Success, Self-Recognition, and Web Design at Encompass Academy

Success, Self-Recognition, and Web Design at Encompass Academy

Students at Encompass Academy Build Portfolios To Showcase Their Academic Accomplishments Throughout High School

Hello, my name is Jessica Svoboda and I am a science teacher at Encompass Academy in Reno, Nevada. I have always felt strongly about the current education system and think there are ways we can make it better. My inspiration to become an educator stemmed from some of my favorite people who didn’t feel successful in high school, but became incredibly successful later in life. Because of them, I realized I wanted to teach with the goal of ensuring all students could feel successful and see their potential.

With the support of the CodeHS Inspire Fellowship, I started working on a project that my school administrator and I had been discussing for a while. We wanted to figure out a way to create a database to house student portfolios, displaying academic and personal achievements. I suggested we utilize the HTML portion of CodeHS in our computer science class to make digital websites to track progress. Through several iterations, we were able to successfully help students build personal homepages to track their accomplishments in work, athletics, art, and academics!

The goal of this project was to give students an opportunity to express themselves creatively through webpages while building a way to track and share their amazing accomplishments through high school.” Students had the freedom to build a site from scratch on CodeHS, or use structured code to create a living document with evidence of their progress.

Throughout the year, I have seen so many students rise to the occasion and find success as well as joy in the problem-solving process of coding, even with challenging time constraints.

Encompass Academy is a Title 1 Public Charter School. In my opinion, our students are some of the most hardworking, empathetic and compassionate young people out there. In total, 46 out of 110 students were able to take Computer Science and Applications this school year. Out of those 46, I saw a couple of students really excel. One student in particular struggled with coding, but pushed herself through the course and completed it successfully. Her resilience and refusal to give up was so inspiring!

Another student made the exciting decision to pursue computer science after high school! It was incredible to be able to provide an opportunity to him, knowing he may not have received a jumpstart in coding without this program.

I am proud that many of my students created basic outlines for their websites, and I’m excited to know they will be able to continue building their portfolios throughout their academic careers. In the future, we hope to continue to integrate this project into other classes to ensure portfolios stay updated.