There are plenty of ways to promote diversity in tech, and over the last year, tech companies, now acutely aware of the lack of women and minorities in their ranks, have started exploring many of them. For some, like Intel, it involves creating a $125 million fund to invest in startups with diverse founders. For others, like Google, it involves partnering with organizations like the Anita Borg Institute to attract more women to its annual developer conference.
For Qualcomm, the wireless technology company based in San Diego, it involves approximately a dozen beanbag chairs, a few whiteboards, a handful of IKEA tables, and lots and lots of props. These are the makings of Thinkabit Labs, a mini-school within Qualcomm's headquarters that launched last year. Three days a week, busloads of middle schoolers, many of them from groups underrepresented in tech, take a field trip to Thinkabit, where Qualcomm staffers aim to expose them to all the careers the industry has to offer. Oh, and they get to build their own robots, too.
In that way, Thinkabit Labs is not all that different from the hundreds of tech bootcamps for kids across the country. The difference is, Thinkabit is doing it at scale. While other programs may cycle through a few dozen students a year, during the 2014-2015 school year alone, Qualcomm says it brought more than 3,000 students from around the San Diego area through Thinkabit Labs. And while the day trip is far from the full-fledged educational experience kids might get at, say, a month-long bootcamp, educators involved with the program say it's already making a difference in students' lives.
"Many of our students come from low-income backgrounds, and their parents don't have careers where they go off to a nice office building in San Diego," says Dr. Eric Chagala, principal at San Diego's Vista Innovation and Design Academy, also known as VIDA, where some 79 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and a full 36 percent are homeless. "We talk about college a lot with kids, but we don't show them the why. I think of Thinkabit as showing kids the why of what we’re doing in school."
For the first part of the day, the Thinkabit Labs team teaches students about all the jobs that exist at Qualcomm and similar tech companies, from librarian to systems engineer. The team outlines the skills that go into each job, as well as the average salary, the education requirements, and, perhaps most importantly, how in-demand that job will be by the year 2022.
"Our big driver was: How can we get a kid to aspire to a career they don't know exists?" says Jennifer Manfredi, who leads this part of the instruction and was herself a high school teacher for ten years. "We want to get them excited about the possibilities."
Toward the end of the day, the students get a rudimentary lesson in robotics taught by a woman named Saura Nederi, who launched a similar lab at UC San Diego. The lesson fuses arts and crafts with some simple coding and electrical engineering skills, so that by the end of the day, the students have created their own moving robot from scratch. It's by no means as extensive as the skills that groups like Girls Who Code teach their students, but it's not supposed to be, says Manfredi. Instead, it's a way to help as many students as possible understand technology's potential and ensure, in her words, that "every student leaves here successful."
According to Chagala, the Thinkabit experience has been particularly effective in pushing more girls at his school to pursue STEM programs once the field trip is over. At the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year, about 15 percent of VIDA's robotics team was made up of girls. By the end of the year, that number had jumped to 50 percent. Because that growth occurred only among the students who had visited the lab, Chacala says he's fairly confident he has Thinkabit to thank for the change.
Of course, there are countless other support systems that need to be put in place to ensure that any student who wants to pursue a career in tech can pursue a career in tech. That's why Thinkabit has also begun hosting teacher training courses in the space and has started counseling schools on how to build their own labs and design curricula for them. That's in addition Qualcomm's other education-related philanthropy, including a program called Wireless Reach, which funds ed-tech related projects around the world. In the meantime, the company is also eyeing expanding Thinkabit to four or five days a week to accommodate all the demand in San Diego alone. But the big hope, says Manfredi, is to encourage other companies both in and out of the tech sector to start similar labs.
"One of the keys to starting this was the hope that we’d create a buzz in our community. If a biotech company or law firm or whatever the industry were to have a lab space, imagine what that would do for a kid," Manfredi says. "It's way more powerful than another museum tour."
