CodeBridge — learn to code in your own language.
Free bilingual computer science, Spanish and Arabic alongside English, taught in person at partner high schools and released openly online. For students who already think in one language and are being asked to learn two hard things at once.
The Problem
The barrier is the language, not the logic.
A student who reasons fluently in Spanish or Arabic sits down to an English-only curriculum with English-only error messages, English-only documentation and an English-speaking teacher. They are debugging their English at the same time as their code, and when they struggle, everyone in the room reads it as "not a coder." The logic was never the hard part. The translation tax was.
San José has one of the largest Spanish-speaking and Arabic-speaking student populations in the state, and effectively no CS instruction that meets them in it.
What It Is
A CS curriculum that speaks both languages at once.
Bilingual by design, not translated after
Concepts are introduced in the learner's stronger language and the English technical vocabulary is taught alongside it, deliberately, as its own skill. Students finish able to read English documentation, because that is the actual job, but they never had to guess their way to the concept underneath it.
Free, in person, and openly published
Taught as a cohort at a partner high school by trained volunteers. Every lesson, exercise and slide is released under an open licence so any teacher anywhere can run it without asking us for permission or paying anybody.
How It Works
Four moves, one cohort.
Partner
A high school or community college agrees to host a cohort and provides the room, the schedule and the students.
Baseline
Students take a short pre-survey on confidence and prior exposure. Same instrument runs again at the end, so the delta is honest.
Teach
Weekly sessions across a full term, taught bilingually by a trained volunteer, with the open curriculum available to students at home.
Hand off
Graduates are routed to Passage for scholarship and status navigation, and invited back as mentors in the language they learned in.
Who It's For
Named plainly.
High-school students
Grades 9 to 12 at partner schools in San José, especially at campuses with no AP CS offering at all.
First-year college students
Students taking their first programming course who are quietly drowning in the vocabulary rather than the material.
Spanish and Arabic speakers first
Those two languages come first because that is where the instructional design and the volunteer bench actually exist. Other languages follow real capacity, not ambition.
The Limits
What CodeBridge will not do.
- No program touches minors until the safeguarding policy exists. That means parental consent forms, a background-check policy for adult volunteers, a two-adult rule and a mandated-reporter acknowledgment. Until those are written and adopted, there is no cohort. This gate is not negotiable and it is not going to be quietly dropped.
- Not a bootcamp and not a job guarantee. A term of CS instruction is a beginning. Anyone promising employment outcomes from a free high-school cohort is selling something.
- Not a replacement for a school's CS department. CodeBridge runs alongside partner schools, with their teachers, on their terms.
- Not machine translation. Bilingual instruction means a bilingual human in the room. Running the slides through a translator is not the program.
- No student data sold, shared or published. Pre and post surveys are anonymised and reported only in aggregate.
Honest Status
What's real, and what isn't.
What's real
The research is published and peer-reviewed. The founder already runs CS programming at Yerba Buena High School through the SJSU CSEd lab, with expansion to Lynbrook underway. The instructional approach has been tested with 60 participants under an IRB protocol.
What isn't
Zero CodeBridge cohorts have run. No curriculum has been published under the Miftah name, no volunteers are trained, no school has signed a partnership, and the parent organization is not yet incorporated. Every number below is a target for the first year, not a result.
Year-one targets (targets, not results)
- Target: two partner schools, one cohort each.
- Target: students completing a full cohort, measured as completion rate, not enrolment.
- Target: a pre-to-post confidence delta measured with the same instrument used in the published study.
- Target: the full curriculum released openly, in both language pairs.
Get Involved
What would actually help.
A bilingual volunteer who can teach, or a school that will host a cohort. Those two things unblock the program. Money does not, yet.
Miftah Foundation is not yet incorporated and has not applied for recognition of exemption under section 501(c)(3). No application is pending. Contributions are not tax-deductible.