Tiny Chips...Big Possibilities

We Put a Programmable Chip in 1,000s of Hands This Summer. Here's What Happened.

From the Max Strus Basketball Camp, to Euclid Schools, to the Cleveland Mayor's Back-to-School Festival, thousands of students this year have held an NFC chip in their hands and coded it themselves.

That might sound small, but it isn't.

An NFC chip is the size of a coin and has no battery. A phone taps it, powers it, and pulls whatever's stored on it. It’s also the same technology behind paying at the register and the tags in professional jerseys that feed stats to the broadcast.

At each of these events, students programmed their own to open a highlight video, a portfolio page, a message. They wrote the code, tested it with a tap, and reprogrammed with new ideas.

That's when it clicks. The turnstile, the payment terminal, things that used to just work stop being magic and start being systems students can work in. They start seeing themselves as people who build technology, not just people who use it.

And the proof this works shows up in the numbers: 93% of students say they want a STEM career after participating, and 67% leave feeling very confident solving problems.

None of this happens without the generosity of the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, whose support let us bring this technology to thousands of students across Cleveland this year at camp, at school, at a festival on a Saturday. Free, and where kids already were.

More events. More chips. More kids coding. We're just getting started and are extremely grateful for partners like Burton D. Morgan Foundation who make it possible.