Genius exists everywhere. What’s lacking is opportunity.
Instructional hours are computed conservatively: dated, per-scholar attendance records multiplied by the daily schedule published on that year’s own program flyer. Sessions without surviving attendance records are excluded. Every simplification rounds down.
The District doubled down. So did our scholars.
In April 2026, Mayor Bowser and the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education awarded more than $2 million in Summer Strong grants to 30 organizations serving over 1,300 young people across the District. OpenWise Learning received $50,000 — more than double our previous award, and the largest grant in our history.
We spent it on the thing that matters most: more expert adults in the room, for longer. Six weeks. Two cohorts. A full teaching team instead of one instructor stretched across a classroom.
The scholars answered. Eleven scholars completed the full six-week immersive, and ten stood up at Demo Day to present working machines they built themselves.
What our scholars build
This summer’s work was organized around the UN Sustainable Development Goals: every scholar chose a real-world problem and built a machine — programmed on a Raspberry Pi, wired to its own sensors — to address it. A selection of what middle schoolers presented at Demo Day, hosted on the campus of Howard University — which provided the space at a discounted rate:
- A solar sentinel that reads its own solar panel through a voltage divider and responds to changing light. (Affordable & Clean Energy — SDG 7)
- A plant rescuer that senses soil moisture and waters in measured burst-and-soak cycles. (Life on Land — SDG 15)
- An atmosphere guardian that fuses an air-quality sensor with heat data — telling bad air from a heat event, or both at once. (Climate Action — SDG 13)
- A sorting collector that detects an object by ultrasound, approaches it, grabs it with a servo claw, and announces the catch. (Sustainable Cities — SDG 11)
- A pedestrian-first transit bus with three ultrasonic sensors that yields to people in its path. (Sustainable Cities — SDG 11)
- A delivery robot that knows by button when it’s loaded and by ultrasound when it has arrived. (Zero Hunger — SDG 2)
Earlier in the summer, the same scholars built branching story-games and mazes around the same goals — a grocery-and-cooking narrative for Zero Hunger, a city maze for sustainable communities — learning to code before they learned to wire.
Rated by the District. Twice. Top marks both times.
The DC Office of Out of School Time sends an independent assessor to observe the program each summer. In 2025 they rated OpenWise “Performing.” In 2026, “High Performing.” Both are the top band of the District’s scale, awarded by two different evaluators in two different years — with perfect marks for creating a safe environment each time.
Those ratings describe a program built for the children of Wards 7 and 8 — and the young people who walk through our door are exactly who we built it for.
The results bear the design out. In the most recent year the District required us to report against measurable targets, scholars’ computing skills grew 50% on average — double the 25% goal we set. Ninety percent reported greater confidence in STEM. And the need is real: that year, every scholar qualified for free or reduced-price meals, and 29% had an Individualized Education Plan — nearly twice the national average. These are children the system routinely underestimates, doing rigorous technical work and exceeding every target set for them.
Not a summer camp. A four-year pipeline.
Most enrichment reaches a child once and lets go. OpenWise is built to hold on. A scholar who starts with us in middle school can move through four sustained stages — the summer immersive, a year-round STEM Leadership Corps, mentorship, and apprenticeship — each building on the last.
Depth of exposure is the whole model. A scholar who completed our 2026 summer received roughly 260 hours of instruction in six weeks — about 43 hours a week. Nationally, children in afterschool programs average 6.83 hours a week, or roughly 246 hours across an entire school year. An OpenWise summer delivers more than a full school year’s worth of that time — in six weeks.
That is a deliberate choice. We could reach more children more briefly; instead we go deep with fewer, because a scattered hour here and there does not change a child’s sense of what they are capable of. Sustained, serious time with the work does. This is not a drop-in program, and our scholars and their families know it.
And the year-round STEM Leadership Corps is, quite literally, a decade of Saturdays, most of them at the public library — Northeast, Southeast, and Capitol View branches, session after session, without a gap year since 2016.
That design shows up in the record. A scholar who entered our 2023 summer as a middle schooler earned admission to one of the District’s selective high schools and returned in 2026 to mentor the incoming cohort — the pipeline reproducing its own teachers. Our Nairobi cohorts show the same pattern at scale: 18 scholars carried through the 2018–2019 waves and 21 through 2023–2024, staying with the program well beyond their first summer. Continued participation in a free program a young person chooses to return to, year after year, is its own kind of outcome.
Where our scholars go
The measure of a pipeline is where it leads. Their names withheld to protect their privacy, our alumni have carried OpenWise into university and beyond:
- A 2019 Washington scholar continued through our advanced tracks and is now an information-science undergraduate at a highly selective U.S. research university — with internships at major technology and defense-sector firms, and a civic project using Python to analyze public crime data.
- A 2018 Nairobi scholar is entering undergraduate computer science, has competed in an international youth AI hackathon, and has built and deployed a client-facing website.
- A 2019 Nairobi scholar is in the fourth year of a computer-science degree and works professionally as a junior developer on a publicly distributed mobile app. (OpenWise supplied both Nairobi scholars with computing equipment through their university years.)
- A 2023 Washington scholar entered the immersive as a middle schooler, earned admission to one of the District’s selective high schools, and returned in 2026 to mentor the incoming cohort — the pipeline reproducing its own teachers.
Others have progressed from our cohorts into competitive university-affiliated health-careers programs, and built community platforms of their own — including one scholar who, in the isolation of the pandemic, built an app to support teen mental health.
Advanced technology, at a fraction of the cost
The engine under all of this is deliberately frugal. OpenWise teaches programming, electronics, robotics, and applied AI on a fleet of refurbished 2015 MacBook Air laptops, wiped and re-imaged with free open-source Linux — acquired for roughly $150 a unit rather than the price of new hardware.
It’s a circular-economy answer to a real barrier: capable machines in front of children in under-resourced schools, at a cost those schools could actually sustain. Nothing about our curriculum depends on a device a family or a district can’t afford.
What families tell us
One parent — an IT professional who didn’t know Python — printed the course materials to learn alongside her son, and described the moment his code first ran: “That gives those kids power.”
Another explained why her son stayed after his friend dropped out: “He knows coding programs cost a lot, and cherishes it.”
Anacostia to Nairobi — a diaspora-built model
OpenWise didn’t stay in one place. From 2018 we delivered in Nairobi as well as Washington — nearly 100 scholars across four Kenyan cohorts — running each fall to fit the Kenyan school calendar.
That chapter is paused. Our partnership there wound down in 2024, and the funding environment that supported it closed with USAID in 2025. Our equipment stayed in Kenya, serving young people through a board member’s local programs, and we keep a presence in the region with the intent to return.
We tell it straight because the honest version is the stronger one: a STEM education model built in Anacostia and proven on two continents is something no local program can claim and no competitor can copy.
Be the opportunity
Genius exists everywhere. Opportunity is something people supply. There are three ways to supply it:
- Partner with us — organizations, schools, and funders
- Mentor a scholar — if you work in tech, this is the highest-leverage hour you can give
- Volunteer — classroom support, field trips, and Demo Days