Start of our 10th year – January 2026

Hope IT welcomes the new year, and look forward to what this may bring.  This is the 10th year of Hope IT.  We are grateful for all the partnerships and students that we connected with over all these years.

There is so much going on, we made a longer newsletter this time.  (And that may occur a few times again in the next few months as well.)

1. 1. 1. Soldering Extra Session in early December
      2. A high schooler volunteered with Hope IT for 60 hours from October to early January.
      3. Our upcoming “Stories with Data” starts this Saturday!!

Below are the details:

Soldering Extra Session: 

• • On the first Saturday of December, even though we usually take this month off, we just took pleasure to offer an extra one-day session to solder LED lights on Christmas ornaments. 
  • This is sort of a continuation of the Robotics course, making circuits permanent by soldering the LED lights.
  • 2 students from the Door of Hope came.
  • The students learned how to be careful with the hot soldering irons.  Notice the smoke in the first picture below.  They don’t actually hold the ornament…there are “fingers” that keep the ornament still.
  • They both finished 2 ornaments (see the picture above).
    • The first was a snowman that was easier.
    • The Christmas tree ornament was much harder, with many more LED lights to solder.
  • The students got to take these ornaments home, and remember that they created these themselves.  There is a battery and an on-off switch, so the LED lights flicker while it is on.  It was just fun.

High School volunteer putting in 60 non-paid hours for Hope IT

• • From October to early January, Ian – a high school volunteer – put in 60 hours of non-paid hours to help out Hope IT.
    Ian is a senior at Arcadia High School.  He took an optional elective course titled “Work and Career Readiness”, that had a requirement to spend 60 hours in an internship.  Ian chose Hope IT for his internship.
  • He spent 4 weeks assisting the Hope IT team to run the Robotics course in October.  See the picture below of Ian at the Robotic course.   As we had such a large number of students, we needed the help.  Ian had experience with Robotics, and assisted in 2023 with Hope IT had a Robotics course only for the Door of Hope.
  • Most of his hours was spent working on website building, for a group called Temple City Coalition, which provides lunch and community for the unhoused in Temple City. The Hope IT team provided the connection, and guidance on what to do.
    • Temple City Coalition needed help with their website, as it was not updated over 5 years.
    • He learned how to make changes in Weebly.
    • He spent 40+ hours working on an alternative, creating Temple City Coalition’s website entirely in WordPress, without taking our Hope IT WordPress course.  He had to learn WordPress skills all by himself.  He pulled in all the pictures/images, and re-create all their blog posts.
    • The last picture below shows the Blog page where Ian created all of the posts, and brought in so many pictures for each blog post.
    • This allows Temple City Coalition to decide to move to a WordPress platform.  They can also see it is possible for high schoolers to assist them with their website updates.
    • Ian’s work could provide an opportunity for an additional paid internship for a Hope IT student this year, if Temple City Coalition decides their best path forward is to use WordPress (which is one of the courses Hope IT will teach next month.)
    • In Ian’s words, “This job was my first real professional internship, and with it, I’ve learned what it’s like to work in such an environment…the technical skills I picked up are ones I’ll definitely carry with me.”
    • Thank you Ian!!

Next upcoming course, Stories with Data:

• • This is an on-line course where students begin to learn how to make the data tell a story, on what going on.
  • We create grids, line, bar and other charts.
  • Oh, and there is some math involved…oh my!  Basic statistics on totals, means, medians, modes, maximum, minimum, and other statistical concepts.
  • This is a job-ready skill that once students get good at, will serve them well in a tech job…or any job for that matter.

We look forward to these next few months!

Peace,
–Mike Veerman
Hope IT team lead

Hope IT is thrilled to see 6 students at our Robotic course this month, see the above picture.

Here’s a glimpse of the students.

• They are all from the Door of Hope.  (All students in our Saturday courses last school year were also from the Door of Hope, so you can see a strong partnership here.)
• The ages range from 12 to 19 at the start of the course. (2 students celebrated birthdays on the next Sunday after we started.)
• We have 5 boys/young men, and 1 girl.
• 4 are still in middle/high school, and one is in college, and another is deciding next steps.
• What is great to see is, the students are helping each other, taking turns, as they work in pairs.  They wired up a circuit to make an LED light up, then added a button to enable turning the light on and off.  The exercise gives them basic familiarity,  comfort and intuition with electrical circuits.
• In Week 2, we added programming to make these LED lights flash.
• We also have one high school volunteer, assisting others to learn.  With the large course, we needed the help!

Hope IT is grateful for our partner and friends at Pasadena-based Barnabas Robotics, which creates Robotic kits and classes for all ages of kids; we purchase our Robotic kits from them.  We appreciate their team and work, and benefit from their knowledge.

We look forward to the rest of this month to finish up this Robotics course.  It is just fun!

God bless.

Peace,
–Mike Veerman
Hope IT team lead

 

2 students in paid internships – May 2025

Hope IT connected with two students in the last 4 months, for the WordPress course, as well as paid internships.  We also have another course coming up in June.  Below is some of the highlights.

Websites are fundamental, the base of other technologies.  This does not seem cutting-edge these days.  But all industries like banking, air traffic control, sports and so many others are built on websites.  But how about underserved high school students gaining skills to create their own websites, and then getting paid for using those skills, to help faith-based groups?  That is what Hope IT is all about.

WordPress course in February:

• We had 2 students for the Door of Hope for the on-line WordPress course.
• They learned to edit text, add pictures and videos, and also use the vast number of pre-created web pages from the Astra theme.  When combined, these simple skills allow students to control the content and appearance of the web site.  The 2 pictures above and below show the  student’s web pages they created.
• WordPress is very powerful, and there are already a large number of free tools to just add to, style, and add functionality to your website.  These are called plugins, and the students added plugins to easily shape their web pages, track visitors, edit what visitors see in search pages for their web pages, and learn how to backup their websites.
• WordPress is used in more than 40% of all websites!!  That half a billion websites..and potential customers.   If you know how to use WordPress, you can change many websites!
• Hope IT was able to provide each student with their own website. This gives them the hands-on practice and experience to realize they can really create, manage, and maintain a website.  At the end of the course, they created their own blog.
• The Scriptural reflection was around the Word of God, as we focused on expressing our ideas using WordPress.  This allows us to know God’s creative power in creation, God’s speaking to young people like Samuel, and speaking to the prophets like Jeremiah and Johan, to care for people.

Paid Internships:

What comes out of the WordPress course is a natural progression of getting paid to use those skills.  Shortly after the WordPress course, the internship was in April.  This was the first time Hope IT had 2 students in internships.  This was a stretching experience for the students, as the work was for real organizations.

• Partners
  • BridgesUS has been an internship partner for a second year now.  It worked out well for them, as they were going through many changes with their website, so they needed the help.
  • Hope IT has another new partner – CHOA (Creative Housing Options in Arcadia).  This is a volunteer group in Arcadia, advocating for housing, and they need help in their blog, keeping up their email blasts.
  • The Door of Hope was the partner in on-boarding and paying the students.  Naturally, as the students are from the Door of Hope network, having the Door of Hope on-board them, and for the students to use their pay check system was helpful, as there was already a lot of trust between the non-profit and the family.
  • Knox Presbyterian church financially supports Hope IT, so funds are available for Hope IT to fund these internships.  Students get paid using skills they learn.
• Pre-internship steps:
  • The students obtained the required work permits from their school
  • The students had to fill out an on-line application, having them express their interest in the internship, and confirming they understand the sacrifices and responsibility required.
  • Lastly, the students went through an interview, verbally communicating their thoughts on why they wanted to take on the internship, and answer questions on possible challenges they may face.
• Internship
  • The students were paid $17.50 per hour, and worked up to 20 hours over 4 weeks, averaging 5 hours per week.
  • They worked remotely, and received assignments both through meetings with their intern manager, as well as via email.  The interns had to show up on time for meetings, and communicate to their managers on progress of assignments, and any questions they had.
  • Hope IT also scheduled weekly check-ins with them, to handle any questions or misunderstandings that may occur.  The goal is to assure they are successful in the internship.

Hope IT is grateful the internship worked well.  There was a lot of coordination on the Hope IT team side.

June course – Solving Mazes with the Python programming language:

In June, Hope IT is offering our Python programming course, having students help a virtual robot solve mazes…getting better each week.  This is an in-person course at Knox Presbyterian Church, and Hope IT is recruiting students at this time. The Python language is used so widely (and not taught much in high schools), so this is a key time for students to use this multi-purpose language.

Hope IT is grateful to work with underserved students, and see how they gain skills, confidence, and even see glimpses of God’s love.

God bless.

Peace,
–Mike Veerman
Hope IT team lead

2 students / 2 courses – February 2025 As you probably know, this has been a rough and traumatic start for Year 2025 in the Pasadena area.  The Easton fire has turned our lives, our organizations, and our work upside-down.  Painfully, we find our community needs to focus on just being housed. Hope IT realizes tech courses are not essential right now.  We gently keep in touch with our Pasadena based partners, and see if any students are interested.  We find there is not much energy for that, and we understand. So, we are grateful that the two Door of Hope students that took the AI course in the Fall, took the Data Analysis course in January, and are taking the WordPress course being held now in February.  They are living away from the Pasadena area, so gratefully, they can focus on these topics.  We give you an update on their progress in this newsletter. Data Analysis course in January: Data Analysis is an important topic and skill to have in tech.  If you can work with data, and explain it to others with charts, you distinguish yourself among others.  This is a ready-made skill for writing better papers and presentations, in a class, or at the job.  Below are the key highlights of this course. 2 Students attending Our 2 students are siblings, so there was good collaboration: Older sister (junior in high school), and a younger brother (freshman in high school) One student only made it for the first 2 weeks; the other student attended all 4 weeks. This was the second time one of the students took this course; it made better sense this time around. Looker Studio This course is online, to both reduce the spread of COVID, and allow students far away from the Pasadena area to join in. Looker Studio is free, offered by Google, and works on a browser, see the above screen shot as an example.  All the students need is Internet access.  It is pretty easy to use.  We created reports/dashboard from Google Sheets, and other data sources. We share our reports/dashboard, so the Hope IT team can see the progress of the students; we can see what they understand, and where we need to explain a few steps/concepts a bit more clearly. Datasets: The key point is, are students able to handle data?  We explained the aggregate functions such as maximum, minimum, count, sum, average/mean, and median.  These are a good first step to understand the data we are working with. Our first dataset was our own Cell phone data.  Yes, it was about just 6 rows…one row for each person in the course: 2 students, and 4 Hope IT team members.  We did a few averages of the age of the owners of the cell phones.  We did the total counts of who had iPhones, and who had Android based phones.  This was an exercise that data is real…it connects to us. We got our datasets from Kaggle.  These are ready made. We used the Video Game Sales dataset, as that is a fun dataset and we think our young students get a kick out of seeing which platform and game genre had the most sales.  The above screen shot shows some grid and bar charts on the Video Game Sales dataset. The Hope IT team had to restructure the COVID Cases dataset a bit more straight-forward. One of our key concepts in the course is that data tells a story. For example with our COVID cases dataset, when the COVID cases go way up in California, we feel it.  Schools transition to online classes.  People work from home.  Due to their work, some people are in harms way, in just doing their in-person jobs.  This data showing the upward curve in cases, shows the increased pain in the community. We also include ways one can fool others with data.   By not properly starting at zero, one can exaggerate the differences in bar charts. One can also skew the findings, by not properly canvassing the audience.  For example, if we wanted to survey what cell phones people are using, and we only stand in front of an Apple store, we stand the chance that our findings show people own iPhones by a vast majority. Connections: We touched on a previous course, AI.  We reviewed Julius.ai, a website that works with datasets, using prompts to AI.  This platform will create data analysis for you, from your prompts. Looking forward to the WordPress course to create websites, we embedded one of our reports/dashboards created in Looker Studio, on our website, using WordPress.  If you have multiple skills, you can do some fun combinations!! Scriptural reflection: As good data is a representation of reality, and what we believe, for our Scriptural reflection, we went over the Apostle’s Creed. We focused on the part about Christ Jesus, of him being born from a virgin, died on the cross, and resurrected.  This creed has been agreed upon and recited by Christians for 16 centuries, confirming what we believe!! WordPress course to create websites in February: We just started the WordPress course this month.  WordPress allows one to create websites, quickly and easily.  Below are the key highlights. WordPress is popular You do not use or know programming.  That is one of the main reasons WordPress is so widely used. It is estimated that 30% of all websites use WordPress. If you know how to use WordPress, you have a job-ready skill!! Topics we will cover: The Astra theme quickly makes your website look professional. The Elementor page builder plugin allows you to make changes to your web pages quickly and easily. We will add text, links, pictures, and videos to our website. We will use more plugins: Track the visitor activity to your website Use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to get your web pages seen by visitors. Paid internship follows the course If students are interested, there is a paid internship after this course, for 20 hours, over 4 weeks, at $16.50 per hour. Students will need a work permit. They will have to fill out an application, go through an interview, and if a good match is found, report to a manager to work on a website using their newly acquired WordPress skills. There are so many challenges.  Please pray for our students, our partners, and the Hope IT team.  God walks alongside us all. God bless. Gratefully, –Mike Veerman Hope IT team lead

Gratefulness – November 2024

Hope IT finished two courses.  We summarize what happened below.  Thank you for your prayers.

Finished the Games on Smartphones course at Stars:

Stars has been in the Pasadena community for 20 years now, working with underprivileged children and families.  They are a natural partner for Hope IT, and we are blessed to partner with them.

As we mentioned in our last email, we started a 6 week course to create a game on smartphones.  The picture above shows the group in Week 3.  The picture at the end of this newsletter shows the game we created.  Below are the key highlights.

• Students attendance
  • We fluctuated between 1 student to 6 students each week.
  • 4 students got certificates, making it at least 3 of the weeks.
  • We mostly had girls in the course..and one time..up to 5 girls.
• We found a few smiles along the way 😉
  • We made our phones talk…say what we wanted it to say.
  • We built a complete game, where we navigate a marble between threats and targets.
  • We move the marble by tilting a phone and varying roll and pitch, just like as a fighter aircraft does flying through the air.  (Phones have all the required sensors built in.)  In the picture above, we use a space shuttle model to explain how the sensors detect roll and pitch.
• Students encountered challenges:
  • Ironically the school-provided Chromebooks are so restricted as to not allow students access to MIT’s AppInventor website.  The students used the laptops we provided instead.
  • We got to encourage Math.  (That makes Hope IT smile.)  That is needed.  Students initially were not too enthusiastic, until they saw the role the math played in making the game work.
  • The students had to “repair” the game math: The marble moves on the X-Y axis, but it was going in the wrong direction, because the phone sensors were in the opposite direction.  Students had to identify the problem and fix it mathematically.  That was the hardest part of the course.  After that, students said it was not too hard.
  • Students had to correct the scale of the game with other mathematical modifications.  They directly experienced the mathematical structure of the game by playing the game.
• Hope IT encountered challenges:
  • Hope IT had to provide laptops for the students to use, even test Google Accounts for them to log in, as well as a few times, borrowed phones to try out their changes to the project/game.
  • Hope IT had to create “catch-up” projects, so students that may have missed a previous lesson, could start on the topics for the new week.
  • When new students joined, Hope IT had to work to get that student up to speed (laptop, installing a phone app, and Google account access), so that took away from advancing the entire group together.  It worked out well….students were patient with us.  We are grateful.
• Hope IT has not taught this course since 2019, so it was nice to dust off this course again.  We really liked teaching this course again, especially now that AppInventor works with iPhone, and most youth have iPhones.
  • This course explains real programming concepts like objects.
    • Properties: The X and Y location of the marble, or the color of the circles.
    • Methods: Make the phone talk using built in phone features.
    • Events: Detect when the marble collides with the green or red circles
    • Adjust coordinate systems to get desired directions and scale.
• We covered key programming logic (see picture below to get the idea):
  • IF-THEN-ELSE:
    • If the Marble collides with the Green circle, then say “Great job”
    • Otherwise (it collides with a Red circle) gently let the player of your game to “Try again”.
  • Test your work!!!  Stop and figure out why the program is not working how we expected.  It always does what we told it, but what we told it is not what we meant.  We must rephrase what we want.
• Our phones can do so much.  In a similar theme, we focused on how Jesus takes on so many qualities.  Our Scriptural reflections were on the “I am” statements of Jesus in the Gospel of John.  It is key to hear from Jesus himself, on who he is.  Two well known “I am” statements from Jesus are, “I am the bread of life”, and “I am the good shepherd.”

Recap of our “AI and Integrity” course:

From time to time, Hope IT creates new courses.  We created a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) course, focused on using AI chat bots like ChatGPT, by writing what are called “ai prompts”.  We offered the course in October, but due to difficulties our partners had to get students to sign up before the deadline, we had to revise the 4-week course to shortened 2-week course. We had 2 students from the Door of Hope.  We are grateful to try out our ideas for the new course.  Below are a few highlights.

• This AI course had a different style, in that it was more of a collaboration, the group creating prompts and evaluating the AI responses, and then trying out new prompts together.  This allowed for a lot of discussion, pushing students to express what they thought was the right approach.  Some of the topics we covered were:
  • Should AI be censored?  Should an AI know your age?
  • What protections/limits should an AI have?  If you asked the AI to write a story of a plot of a person blowing up a car, and you need the plot to provide a lot of “real-life” details, should the AI just do what is asked to do?
• Not all AI are built the same.  ChatGPT and PerplexityAI have different answers to the same prompt.
• Not only did we cover text, but we had AI create graphics for us, create photos of minions in the city, with one of them floating in space, see the picture below.  This shows how easily AI can create and alter a picture.
• We covered the high-level concepts on how an AI is built, and how it works.
• Hope IT will continue with this course, and brainstorm how to get more student interest.
  • Students may think they already know enough  about AI, and don’t need this course.  They are unaware of the ethical, privacy, and security issues AI’s can present.
  • Perhaps the word “integrity” does not explain what can go wrong with an AI.
  • Perhaps we need to call the course “AI and Aliens”, as AI doesn’t think like us at all.  Students are unaware of how different an AI is from a real human.
• Our Scriptural reflection on the second week was on prayer.  How do we approach God (a much, much powerful being) when we ask for help, or connect?  We reviewed the parable of the neighbor asking a friend for bread at midnight, in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 11.  God is not only our friend, and will provide, especially in desperate times.

We thank you for your support and encouragement.  Please pray for our students, and our upcoming courses in January (Data Analysis) and February (WordPress…that allows for a paid internship after the course.)

Wishing you a Spirit-filled holidays.  God bless.

Gratefully,
–Mike Veerman
Hope IT team lead

 

 

Our first Intermediate course was on SQL/databases.

SQL & Partners – April 2024

Hope IT just finished our first Intermediate course.  We want to start creating more Intermediate courses, for students that have taken many of our beginning courses, and to offer them topics that lead directly into paid positions.

SQL (and databases) is one such topic so many programmers know.  SQL has been stable for 3 decades unlike other tools and languages that change rapidly over time.  Part of the reason is the many companies that have databases that use SQL, and many programmers just pull data out using this technology, and the problem is so well bounded.  The flip side is, because so many programmers know SQL, it is one of those languages that new databases need to offer, if it will be widely adopted.

With this new course, we only had one student that was ready for this Intermediate course, so this was an invite-only situation.  As this student is far away from LA, we adapted the course to be on-line.  It is best to have this course be taught in-person.

Another interesting development occurred:  Due to all the Hope IT team members schedules in March, we could not all be at the course.  So we took turns leading the course; we all know SQL.  This allowed each of the Hope IT team members to explain different topics, and give different emphasis.  Overall, this course turned out to be very strong…and advanced…for this one student.  We learned how to improve the course for next time.  Below are some of the highlights.

1. We tried to make it fun, so we used an old 1950’s novelty song: “One Eye, One Horn Flying Purple People Eater”.  (See picture above).  Look it up for the video.  The idea is, if there are dangerous alien one-eye creatures, how about 2 eye creatures?  3-eyed creatures?  You get the idea…one needs a database to keep track of all the creatures.
2. We used SQL to pull the data of these creatures from the database.  We used an on-line database emulator called DB-Fiddle.  We also have all our slides and sample code in our Git Lab (commercial public code repository) site, for the student to review as he wishes.  (The picture below shows you a visual example of what SQL does, pulling data out of the creatures table.)
3. We showed how to add (insert) more creatures, delete creatures, and change (update) creatures.  We also used dates to track when creatures were found.  Dates are a key part of SQL and databases; students need to understand how time is represented.
4. We got into very advanced topics like:

• Indexes: How to structure data for very fast retrieval.
• Transactions: How to ensure a whole group of changes are done at one time.
• Very Large databases: We just reviewed what professionals need to think about when your database is very, very large.

To touch this off, in the same theme of showing differences, our Scriptural reflections was the parable of the sower, and the 4 different places the seeds were sown.  And we reflect how we can be good soil.

Partners

Hope IT would not be able to function without partners.  No kids, no laptops, no Rotobic kits, no internships, no funds for kids that are assistants and co-instructors, no fun, no Hope IT.  Our partners make it happen.  So we appreciate all our partners.  We created a new web page, see the link below.

https://hopeit.net/partners/

Here we want to highlight, and thank our partners:

1. Knox Presbyterian Church has been with us since day 1.  We are in year 8 now.  Knox has supported us with prayers, encouragement, financial support, offer their rooms for our courses, allowing us to use their background checks, the same they do with all the adults that work with the Knox children at Sunday School.
2. BridgesUS is Hope IT’s fiscal sponsor, and provides us monthly coaching.  Bridges has been a key partner to offer the internships to kids, working on the Bridges website, using WordPress.  Lastly, Bridges handles the work permits and checks to kids that go through our internship, or are paid being assistants or co-instructors in the Hope IT courses.
3. Barnabas Robotics offers us encouragement, and are our friends.  We buy our Robotic kits from them, as they are packaged nicely and well-thought out.
4. Door of Hope has been a key partner over many years, but especially these last 2 years.  Most of the students coming to the Hope IT courses after COVID have been from the Door of Hope.
5. Sycamores (Foster Care Group Home) in Altadena has sent some of their boys over many years now to Hope IT courses.  We continually work together to find ways to get their boys enrichment opportunities at the Hope IT courses.
6. Stars (after-school and mentorship program) has been a partner for years with Hope IT.  Our highlights are having 3 Stars-only courses.  2 were WordPress during COIVD; these were on-line courses.  A more recent course was creating games with Roblox, with 4th and 5th graders; that was our largest course ever, with 9 students.

Meeting with Stars

Hope IT just had a good re-introduction with Stars a few weeks ago.  As mentioned above, Stars is an after-school and mentoring program for underserved kids in the Pasadena area.  Three members of the Hope IT team came. Hope IT visited their new facilities at Lake Avenue Church.  We heard about many of their efforts during COVID, caring for kids and families around Pasadena.  We are touched and just in awe of their work.  We spoke to key members of the Stars team, and showed what Hope IT has done since 2023.  We agreed to find ways to partner.  We look forward to working with them going forward.  (We forgot to take a picture to show you all.)

Hope IT has a little break in April and May, before we finish this school year with another course in June, Solving Mazes with Python.  We’ll probably have a few more newsletters before the school ends.

We are so grateful for all your prayers, support, and encouragement.  We think kids do see their skill and confidence improve, and see their futures more positively.  Thank God.

Peace,–Mike Veerman
Hope IT team lead

Week 1 in our SQL course – SELECTing all rows from the Creatures table