Modern Life

Generation Impact: A teen inspires others

Jay Jay Patton not only built a groundbreaking app, but she is also helping to teach thousands of Black youth to code.

By John Newton — June 14, 2021

Modern Life

Generation Impact: A teen inspires others

Jay Jay Patton not only built a groundbreaking app, but she is also helping to teach thousands of Black youth to code.

By John Newton — June 14, 2021

When Jay’Aina “Jay Jay” Patton discovered coding, she was a 10-year-old girl who had just gotten her first laptop, learning while peering over her dad’s shoulder. “She was able to comprehend and just absorbed it like a little sponge,” recalls Jay Jay’s father, Antoine Patton. Fast forward to today, and not only has the now 16-year-old built a groundbreaking app, but she is also helping teach thousands of people of color to code. 

The story of Jay Jay, her dad Antoine, and the organizations they lead, Unlock Academy and the Photo Patch Foundation, is the focus of the new short film The Coder. It is the first in a new docu-series called Generation Impact which celebrates young people improving their communities with technology. Directed by documentary filmmaker Samantha Knowles and executive produced by Steven Cantor and Stick Figure Productions, Generation Impact: The Coder is out now on HP’s digital hub, the Garage, and on YouTube.

In the film, we see the love, mutual support, and admiration unfold between Jay Jay and her dad as they work together toward their shared goals, and the inspiring story behind her drive to inspire other Black youth with technology.

Her coding work began when she was just 12 years old, shortly after her father launched the Photo Patch Foundation, a non profit organization that enables children to send photos and letters to parents who are incarcerated for free. Jay Jay noted that the site desperately needed a mobile app, and with her newly discovered coding skills, she built and designed one in just three months. “Jay Jay was always interested in learning science and math from the moment she stepped in school,” her mother, Gina Patton, says. “I think it’s because she loves a challenge.”

Generation Impact: The Coder - Episode 1 | The Garage by HP

The Photo Patch app has proved invaluable for many of the 5.1 million American children who have had a parent in prison, an experience that Jay Jay and Antoine know firsthand. “Visits and phone calls took a lot of money,” Jay Jay recalls of a period in her early childhood when Antoine was incarcerated. “Talking to him wasn’t so easy to do and we didn’t always have envelopes and stamps.”  Photo Patch reports that the app has already been used to send over 800,000 photos and letters to family members. 

After the successful app launch, Patton joined her dad as a youth coding instructor at Unlock Academy, an online school dedicated to helping to inspire other Black techies. The digital school reports that it has already enrolled over 20,000 students, and Jay Jay herself has an ambitious goal: “To personally bring 10,000 women of color into the tech world,” she says proudly.

 

VISIT: Generation Impact to learn more

 

Computer programming remains a field where people of color and women are dramatically underrepresented — accounting for less than 4% of computer science professionals. Patton aims to address some of that disparity by reaching a variety of students, many of them young and curious about the field. (Much research indicates those who pursue a career in a science field do so after developing an interest and having opportunities to explore it at a young age.) “We provide support and help and give people the resources they need in a way they can actually access them,” she explains. “We make people in diverse and marginalized communities feel like this can be something for them.”

Patton’s mission dovetails HP’s pledge to accelerate digital equity for 150 million people by 2030 and improve learning outcomes of 100 million people by 2025.

HP is proudly connecting Unlock Academy to BeChangeMaker, a social entrepreneurship challenge of the HP Foundation and WorldSkills. Finalists in the 2021 contest will have access to a selection of its digital courses.  

Among those taking advantage of the classes offered by the Academy is Naomi Barros, age 16. “I started programming on my own. I took a couple of courses online but they weren’t helping,” Barros says. “My dad found the Unlock Academy and recommended that I look into it.”

Barros’ experience has proven to be about more than learning how to code. “It’s a big family. Every other course that I have taken, they give you the work and you do it, but the Unlock Academy is a bunch of people brought together of different ages, genders, and backgrounds,” she says. “It’s a huge community, it’s really fun, and you get into engaging with a lot of people from different places.”

 

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