TradeZero America Imparts Coding Training to Sixth Graders

TradeZero America is giving back to its community by imparting coding training to school students and encouraging them to take this up as a career option.

After encouraging Americans to start trading, TradeZero America is giving back to its community. The Industry City-based online trading brokerage has partnered with a school in the Sunset Park community to provide its students coding training, according to a report by Brooklyn Eagle.

The trading brokerage’s co-founder Dan Pipitone himself interacted with the students. These students are Charles O. Dewey Middle School sixth graders. TradeZero offers them coding instruction worth three hours each week. The training is imparted through computers with teachers who are commissioned by TradeZero.

TradeZero’s Plan to Give Something of Value to Students

Pipitone considers this move to be a means to help the community where it’s based, as part of its corporate citizenship program. This is quite a blessing for students because they may not get the opportunity to receive such advanced education. That’s why Pipitone and his team zeroed in on coding as the topic to start. The scope of the program is to facilitate proficiency of students in CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other such coding technologies. The duration of the program is planned to be three years. Pipitone said that each successive year the coursework would get more and more intense.   

Changing the Demographics in Web Development

An interesting development is that the first class had 11 female students and 1 male student. This is crucial, considering that just 11% of the workforce in web development was made up by women in 2018-2019, based on recent research by PHP Salary Survey and Pearson Frank Java, as quoted by Brooklyn Eagle. Pipitone himself is the father of two daughters whom he is encouraging with coding. He hopes more young women would take up a coding career.   

Another important aspect of that school, pointed out by Brooklyn Eagle, is that over 90% of its student body in the 2017-2018 school year consisted of students who were nonwhite, based on data from the Department of Education of New York City. That’s crucial too when you consider another survey concerning developers worldwide. The Stack Overflow global survey conducted in 2017 revealed that 72% of the surveyed developers were white. TradeZero’s coding program could be the first step in changing that demographic. 

Positive Response Could Encourage Further Expansion

Pipitone considers the response to the program to be extremely positive. As a result, TradeZero America plans to expand the program to seventh graders next year from the Dewey school and, in later years, to other schools as well. Amanda Bueno, Principal at Dewey, is impressed with how the partnership has progressed thus far. She was particularly impressed by the hands-on nature of the curriculum that is based on projects. She believes it helps build career readiness in students, encouraging them to be leaders of the future, not just in their public and professional lives, but also in their personal lives.

TradeZero America is helping to introduce people to stock trading, making it more user-friendly through its direct access trading platforms, and is particularly known for its short locates platform. Its zero-fee model has also drawn attention.