Yellow Circle

Yellow Circle received a $10,000 grant to grow its capacity and run a coding academy. Yellow Circle is an online platform that allows students to learn about cloud computing and infrastructure.

🌐 https://yellowcircle.net/

Key Accomplishments

• Upgraded learning platform to be able to accommodate thousands of additional users.

• Unveiled programming innovation lab where students could create on-demand environments to bring code to life.

• Brought on student volunteer from the MET High School to assist in video creation and recruitment of students.

• Established relationships with the MET High School and CSUS to offer services to students and teachers.

• Upgraded user interface in preparation for the online academy.

• Tested first school case with the MET High School.

• User base grew by 2,613 students to 50,124 students and over 80,000 projects.

• Local marketing campaign began.

• Leveraged RAILS grant to acquire funding from other sources.

• Established partnerships with Microsoft (cloud credits), Western Digital Foundation (lab equipment), and IBM BlueMix (cloud credits) for program support that is valued at over $20,000.

• User base grew by over 5,000 students to a total of over 56,000 students and close to 95,000 projects.

• More than 20 tutorials have been published to the website with another 20 in the works.

• 20 additional video tutorial scripts were in development.

Performance Metrics

	July 2016	June 2017
Paid Internships	1	4
Volunteers	2	7
Students Served Globally	40,000	55,000
# of Partners / Sponsors	3	9

Assessment

Yellow Circle originally intended to use its funds to develop a code academy on its platform. Because they did not receive all of the funding they had hoped, they used most of their capacity to build up their user capacity and develop partnerships with local schools and organizations. Yellow Circle is another of several RAILS grantees that was able to leverage its RAILS grant funding into additional funding and opportunities and has thusly been able to grow its capacity to offer users access to this platform for free or at low-cost. Yellow Circle plans to continue its growth and looks to partner with council offices to connect with high schools in each district that may be interested in tapping into its curriculum.