South Bend Code School: the Dotcom record's unworked lead, worked

2015 — present

The founding: South Bend Code School was founded in 2015 by three people: Alexandra Sejdinaj — Alexandra Liggins of Notre Dame's class of 2015 — her husband Alex Sejdinaj, and Chris Frederick, the two men then working in information technology at the university. The idea began in tutoring: Liggins, teaching in area high schools in her senior year, watched students conclude that without a college degree no decent job was open to them, taught herself coding, and built a pilot program through Notre Dame's Robinson Community Learning Center, where the three founders met. In the school's first iteration, run just after her graduation, nineteen students built twenty-three websites, four of them civic applications designed to promote nonviolence in South Bend. The school: Its standing form is after-school coding classes for students aged seven to eighteen — web development, design, software craftsmanship and entrepreneurship — taught from its headquarters in Ignition Park, the technology park on the ground of the former Studebaker automobile plant. It expanded across the region: a Fort Wayne partnership with Start Fort Wayne in June 2017, Goshen the same season, Bloomington after, Elkhart as well, reaching some four hundred students in a given week by the university's account. By 2017 more than a hundred students had completed its formal program and more than six hundred had been reached through its outreach. The same three founders also formed Code Works, a digital product studio, and GiveGrove, a fundraising platform for nonprofits. The school stands in this record as the city's own entry in the dot-com era's second act: not a company that arrived with the internet, but a school the internet made necessary, founded by the people who taught its first class.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame, "Using Code to Expand Educational and Career Opportunities" (weare.nd.edu) — the three co-founders, the 2015 start, the after-school classes for ages 7–18, the Technology Resource Center, and the sister companies Code Works and GiveGrove.
2. Notre Dame Magazine, "The Newest Code Makers" (7 January 2016, with later updates) — the Robinson Community Learning Center pilot, the first class's nineteen students and twenty-three websites, the Ignition Park headquarters, the expansion cities, and the four-hundred-students-a-week reach.
3. TechPoint, 24 July 2017, and Start Fort Wayne, 29 June 2017 — the Fort Wayne and Goshen expansions, the 2015 founding, and the program's completion and outreach counts to that date.
4. Indiana University, Crimson Catalyst, 2 October 2018 — the founders' own account of the school's origin in the Robinson Center program.