We are an undergraduate student organization at Yale University dedicated to introducing students to computer science starting at a young age. Every week, Yale students teach computing lessons at several schools in the New Haven district, engaging the students with online lessons, group activities, and class-wide demonstrations. We develop our own curriculum, specifically designed for our classrooms, that we constantly are updating based on what works best. Code Haven also hosts two student events and one teacher event throughout the year. In the fall, Code Haven hosts Demo Day where our students visit Yale campus and interact with CS projects by college students. In the winter, Code Haven hosts TeachTech to share our philosophy and lessons we have learned from our classes with teachers. In the spring, our students present mobile applications they worked on for half of the year at Project Fair.
Code Haven was founded in Fall 2016 by Annie Chen ‘19 and Dennis Duan ‘19 with the support of Professor Dana Angluin and Yale alumnus Nathaniel Granor ‘09. A pilot semester was launched in Dave Weinreb’s sixth grade classroom at Fair Haven School, with 18 students and 6 mentors. In October 2016, Code Haven received funding from Google IgniteCS for its effort in impacting the local community through computer science mentorship. By 2022, Code Haven has grown into a student organization with over 50 members, serving nearly 190 students in New Haven and implementing a computer science curriculum in 8 middle-school classrooms.