With more than 20 years of activity focused on digital empowerment, the social organization Recode has provided the first contact with computer programming for hundreds of young people from low-income communities in Brazil. The NGO´s courses presents computers’ language as a fun and stimulating experience while presents its wide possibilities for new careers, entrepreneurship and income generation.

Meet five young people who reprogrammed their lives with programming:

Aurélio Campos, 25 years old, took our course and found encouragement to create a project for an app to achieve deaf people inclusion. Soon after, he joined an internship in a national e-commerce network and afterwards begun to work as a developer by a software company. The application would bring a map indicating stores, shopping malls, bars, restaurants and leisure programming with accessibility. His intention is to call the attention of companies to improve the accessibility of events and actions. Today, he spread the technology’s possibilities to Morro da Providência’s youth, where he lives, in Rio de Janeiro. He wishes to open his own business in the future.

Gabriella de Araújo, 17 years old, discovered that even without knowing English, it is possible to create her own ideas and solutions by programming. From a student who had very weak familiarity with technology, she is now extremely interested in taking more courses to explore new experiences in the field.

Tatiane Venâncio, 22 years old, lives in Acari, a community in Rio de Janeiro surrounded by drug trafficking and frequent conflicts with the police. Since her graduation from high school, she had been looking for courses to enrich her curriculum. When she knew about Recode´s free courses, she joined every opportunity to learn and also became a class mentor. In addition, she participated as a student in our first course about Exponential Technologies, developing with her group an idea to solve a public health problem trough augmented reality. Because of Recode’s referral in partnership with Locus Institute, she is now working as a “Young Apprentice” at company with Human Resources. Now, in addition to her work, she goes to a pre-college course to enter Biomedicine graduation.

Finally, the first steps in programming with Recode helped Mateus Galdino, 19 years old, to learn about one of the most innovative technological areas. He has won a full scholarship to attend a course for programmers in “blockchain”. It is a technology based on cryptographic techniques to speed up complex transactions, such as Bitcoin, the virtual currency.