Yesterday marked the annual CS Fair in New York City. Co-produced in partnership between Gotham Gives and Tech:NYC, this free event is an opportunity for nearly 2,000 high school students from schools all across the city to get off-campus and connect with industry professionals to learn more about career paths and job opportunities in tech.
While it’s incredible to invite students to connect with some of the major tech players, industry partners, nonprofits, and other educational institutions in the city, a few years ago, we realized that we were potentially missing out on a chance to invite students to explore some of the bleeding-edge bits of tech.
So we decided to introduce an emerging tech area at the fair, where students and teachers could meet with some of the more nascent builders and startups in NYC’s ecosystem (think: AI, crypto, NFTs, etc.).
Since it’s pretty unusual for a high school student or teacher to be exposed to such deep tech topics, we hope this interactive exposure with industry professionals (while brief), opens the door for a larger dialogue back in the classroom and beyond.
We’ve done our best to anchor this area at the fair on some of the most “in vogue” areas of tech. And this year, the rage is all about so-called “vibe-coding,” or building software without writing code. So we decided to do something unusual at the CS Fair and dedicate an entire room to what you could build without writing the code yourself.
It’s one thing to say you can build something in minutes with a no-code AI powered software platform. But it’s another to actually do it yourself.
So we intentionally designed the room as a hands-on, experiential immersion, which of course, starts with a prompt.
Over 30 volunteers from various corners of today’s burgeoning no-code tech ecosystem showed up and paired off with students in groups. We prompted them to work with us in prompting AI to build a few high-school relatable ideas.
What Students Built
A few things that students built in minutes with industry volunteers included:
A flag-guessing game (built with Lovable)
Underwater Tetris (built with Tapestry)
A playable digital game of chess that involved two rows of pawns (built with Indigo)
Many variations on minesweeper with customizations (built with Websim)
A volunteer even built a game for my four-year-old daughter that involved catching falling princesses. In other words: The vibes were on point.
When Industry Meets Education
What we learned is that events like this are mutually beneficial for industry volunteers as for the students.
As one volunteer, Lacroix Scott, shared afterward:
"As a first time volunteer of the CS Fair, it was illuminating to see gen alpha so excited about the future of technology and AI. I was really impressed by the genuine curiosity and kindness that were applied to the ideas for app creation and it gives me hope for the future generation of budding technologists."
The more time you spend world-building your startup, the easier it is to lose touch with the reality most people experience. For example, one volunteer met several students who had still never used ChatGPT, and the idea of building an app without coding is still unfamiliar to many.
In years past, I would notice myself asking students, “What are you most excited to learn about in your CS classes?”
When prompted with that question, you get the expected answers: Javascript, python, databases.
But this year, I found myself asking a more powerful permutation: “What do you most what to build with code?”
Framed in that way, the question unlocks a world of practical possibility, even more so when you recognize that getting a prototype out the door is possible right now.
It was a treat watching their minds get blown as we built full websites and games in
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This “I can build that right now?!” realization and wonderment is an incredibly powerful learning motivator. While it’s tricky (if not impossible) to track causation from a single event like this, I know it inspired at least a few people to make something new.
One volunteer texted me this morning. After building a half-dozen Minesweeper variations with students yesterday, he went ahead and pushed publish on his own last night.
Special thanks to Bryan Lozano and Jennifer Klopp and to all of our volunteers in the AI No-Code Builder Room and AI Exploration rooms yesterday, including: Yusuf Ahmad, Wyman Khuu, Adi Sideman, Matt Cynamon, Jonathan Libov, David Gabeau, Jody Tu, Sydney Iadarola, Max Bittker, Sean, Rob, Jack Dille, Dan Stone, Brenner Spear, Dan Shipper, Brandon Gell, Kate Lee, Jon Chan, Sara Chipps, Saadiq Rodgers-King, Stacy Xiq, Olivia Levenson, Raquel de Lavandeyra, Lacroix Scott, Brendan O'Brien, and of course, Lydia, my four-year-old daughter who dutifully minded the MuseKat table with me.
