Two teens taught coding in shelters. Now it is story hour.
Open Sesame started as A Month of Code in 2017. High school volunteers still show up for kids in Orange County shelters.
Katherine McPhie and Milan Narula were teenagers when they met while volunteering at a homeless shelter in 2017. They noticed what was missing and decided to fill it with Python.
Their first project, A Month of Code, was a pilot at a domestic violence shelter. The kids were highly engaged, according to Inspiring Young Heroes, so the pair organized classes at other shelters. The program became Open Sesame Coding for Kids. At its peak, volunteers led sessions at nine shelters in six cities, with more than 120 high school and college students working one-on-one with children from kindergarten to eighth grade. More than 100 children learned computer skills, many for the first time. The founders also wrote grants that raised nearly $30,000 for Chromebooks and other materials, and they won the 2019 Barron Prize for Young Heroes.
The project has since changed shape. Pass It On reports it is now Open Sesame Stories for Kids. Volunteers lead storytimes, group discussions and story-based crafts at shelters, and each child takes home a story kit. The point is to build courage, character and creativity, and in the article’s words to “keep the magic going.”
The organization’s own site describes the current setup. It is run by high school volunteers who read classic stories to children in homeless and domestic violence shelters in Orange County. Kids sit in story circles, discuss the tales, retell them through drawings, skits or puppet shows, and take home a recap and a craft. The site says that since 2018, more than 200 trained volunteers have served across six cities, contributing more than 1,200 hours.
The pivot from code to stories is the interesting part. Coding is a great skill, but a child in a shelter may need a quieter kind of access first: a grown-up voice, a plot to follow, a reason to say what happens next. The founders, to their credit, seem to have listened to that.
It is also an organization that kept going after its founders aged out of high school, which is the real test of a student project. Open Sesame passed it by handing the work to the next class of teenagers.
Contact: codeopensesame@gmail.com
