The doorbell rings, and Katie Wenger, 13, leaps up from the family dinner table and throws open the front door. On the stoop of her family’s building in Chelsea stands a 26-year-old Yale graduate named Allison Kaptur. Formerly a financial analyst, Kaptur quit to teach herself how to program and now works as a facilitator at Hacker School, a “writers’ retreat for programmers,” with a sideline as a coding tutor. The two descend the stairs to a basement study, and Katie shuts the door. “I’ve got exciting news,” she says. “I’m going to launch a start-up! It’s called Let Us.”“What will it do?”
“It’ll be like Chatroulette, but connected to Facebook.” Katie describes her concept for an online environment in which strangers can randomly meet and either just chat or interact educationally as student and teacher. Kaptur nods. “Okay,” she says. “A little later, we can talk about the pieces we would need to make that work.”
For most people, software programming’s social cachet falls somewhere between that of tax preparation and autism. But it’s catching fire among forward-thinking New York parents like Katie’s, who see it as endowing their children both with a strategically valuable skill and a habit for IQ-multiplying intellectual rigor. According to WyzAnt, an online tutoring marketplace, demand for computer-science tutors in New York City has doubled each of the past two years. And if one Silicon Alley–backed initiative pans out, within a decade every public-school kid in the city will have access to coding, up from a couple of thousand.
Down in the Wengers’ study, Kaptur flips open a MacBook Air. “For now, let’s work on a hangman game.” Lines of Python code fill the screen. On a piece of paper the two begin sketching out a stick figure and a flow diagram to figure out how the program will render it. Katie breathes a sigh. “This is more complicated than I thought it would be,” she says. “This is going to take more than an hour.” Sure enough, by the time Kaptur packs up to go, they haven’t yet gotten around to rendering the stickman’s arms, let alone plotted out the next billion-dollar app.
Back upstairs, the parents are lingering over a long dinner. Katie’s mother, Susan Danziger, runs a web-video start-up; her father, Albert Wenger, is a managing partner in the VC firm Union Square Ventures, an early investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, and Kickstarter. The couple started Katie and her two brothers on programming when they were 7 or 8. “The goal isn’t necessarily for everyone to become a computer-science engineer, just as when you teach people how to write English, the goal isn’t for everybody to become an author,” says Wenger. “The point is that it’s a very important way of analyzing the world, thinking about the world, interacting with the world, and manipulating the world. It is a fundamental enabling skill that is applicable across the widest imaginable set of domains.”
by Jeff Wise, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Brian Finke
