Thomas Jefferson High School junior Swetha Prabakaran was named a White House "champion for change" for helping kids learn coding through her nonprofit organization. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
Swetha Prabakaran dreamed of becoming a physician, using the power of medicine to heal the sick and to are for the ailing.
She studied biology in middle school, but the course of her life changed during her freshman year at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Virginia. She took an introductory class on computer science and learned about programming, becoming fascinated with coding and the intricacies of how to teach computers to make life easier for people.
“I learned I could help people in the same way with computers and not just a stethoscope,” said Swetha, 15, a junior from Ashburn, Va.
Earlier this month, Swetha was honored at the White House as one of 11 young women named “champions of change,” for her work as the founder of Everybody Code Now! The nonprofit operates in 12 states and has partnerships in India and Ghana to help elementary school students, from kindergarten through fifth grade, learn how to code. According to a White House statement, the Champions of Change program “was created as an opportunity for the White House to feature individuals doing extraordinary things to empower and inspire members of their communities.”
[These girls are the coders of the future]
Swetha beat out 1,000 other nominees and was one of two 15-year-olds celebrated at a recent ceremony. In remarks to the honorees, senior Obama administration adviser Valerie Jarrett said that Swetha’s ambition is an example to be admired.
“She said, ‘Now you make me reconsider what I was doing as a 15-year-old — and that’s embarrassing,’ ” Swetha said. “That was pretty cool.”
Swetha said that she began teaching young students how to code as a sophomore hoping to pass on her own excitement for the seemingly limitless potential of computer programming. Swetha has created a Pokemon game and is now working on an app to streamline the process for food banks to get donations into the hands of the needy.
“I really like the fact that when I build an app, you can push it out to the App Store and have it in the hands of thousands of people the next day,” Swetha said. “Seeing that reward really motivates me and inspires me.”
Swetha, whose parents are software engineers, said that her goal is to inspire girls to get interested in coding and perhaps consider a career in the field of computer science.
“There’s a perceived notion that computers and math are difficult and challenging, which they are, but there’s this idea that it’s unattainable,” Swetha said. “Girls and boys think they’re not smart enough, so they don’t give it a try. It’s just telling your computer what to do.”
Besides running her own nonprofit, Swetha also participates in Model United Nations, is a freestyle swimmer on the Thomas Jefferson team and is exploring her college options. She spent the summer in her family’s native home, in Tirunelveli, in southern India. There, she studied traditional bharatanatyam dance, taking part in exhaustive practices for her capstone routine, or arangetram, in which she demonstrated her mastery of the fluid steps and hand positions of the art form.
Swetha said that she sees similarities between dance and coding.
“There are rules with coding and dance, and they are both at the same time very, very creative,” Swetha said. “You’re creating something new that has never been done before.”
She said that like dance, coding is about learning the basics. In both disciplines, she said, you perfect one technique, and then you add a level of complexity, with each layer building on the one preceding it.
“You put it all together to create your own” performance or program, she said.
Swetha said she hopes to use coding to benefit others, as she would as a physician. She said she finds the most satisfaction in teaching others how to code and revealing to them a new dimension at their fingertips.
“It’s about showing them what kind of power they have with the devices they hold in their hand,” she said.