OpenWise Learning

10/13/2026

Summer 2019, week one in Washington: our scholars assembled their own computers from Raspberry P*s, learned that computers "only do as they are told," and then messaged each other across the room. "What's your network ID?" Everyone wanted to talk to everyone.

That fall, school-year sessions began in Nairobi, the follow-up we had promised when the immersive there started.
https://www.openwiselearning.org/dc-summer-owl-immersive-week-1/

We are 1 week into our Summer STEM Immersive and it has been a great start! Our participants have been

10/06/2026

November 5, 2018: the first day of our first immersive in Nairobi.

Two lines in that budget mattered most: lunch every day, and a transport stipend of Ksh 200 a day for any family that needed it, so the cost of getting there could not decide who got to learn.

That morning we wrote that we were looking forward to working with this group "over the coming years." We meant it.
https://www.openwiselearning.org/nairobi-immersive-starts/

Today marked an exciting new chapter for OpenWise Learning! We started the pilot of our OWL Immersive in Nairobi, Kenya

09/29/2026

February 2018. We opened our spring school-year sessions by taking our scholars to see Black Panther for Black History Month.

What we wrote that week: a film full of characters who are strong, heroic and incredibly intelligent, who solve problems with science and technology, and who ask what we owe one another. It lined up with what we had been teaching about technology and justice. And the kids simply had fun.
https://www.openwiselearning.org/black-panther-spring-2018-academic-year/

We started our spring Academic Year sessions and celebrated black history month with a field trip to see the new

09/27/2026

July 28, 2017: the last day of our second summer.

Each scholar presented two things to a room of parents, educators and peers: the technical skills they had built over six weeks, and the global problem they cared about most, chosen from the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Code, and a reason to write it.

We wrote about their graduation that day:
https://www.openwiselearning.org/summer-immersive-2017-graduation/

Today we end the last day of our summer immersive, and our impressive kids from our 2017 cohort graduate. Each

09/15/2026

Ten years ago, this room was everything OpenWise had.

In June 2016 we set up a borrowed classroom at Malcolm X Elementary for our first summer program. DC Public Schools enrolled the cohort through its own summer-school registration system, for a program nobody had heard of yet.

We blogged that first summer as it happened, and those posts are still up exactly as we wrote them. Here's the first, from the week we moved in:
https://www.openwiselearning.org/our-new-classroom/

09/11/2026

Ten scholars. Six weeks. Machines that work.

What the District's Summer Strong investment built in Anacostia this summer....

What the District's Summer Strong investment built in Anacostia this summer.

08/16/2026

Thank you Shake Shack Dupont Circle, for helping us finish the week with a delicious meal! The kids loved the burgers and fries. Check our their great staff the the Dupont location.

08/15/2026

Yesterday our scholars received a great donated lunch from Moe's Southwest Grill (Check out their 1275 1st St NE location in DC!) We really appreciated their help in providing meals this week for our hard working Robot building students!

08/13/2026

Shout out to Pizza Hut for providing lunch yesterday to the young scholars are they planned for their final robot presentations! Check out their location on Georgia Ave in DC.

08/13/2026

A huge thank you to chardeats.com for sponsoring a lunch for our STEM scholars final week of the program. They were hard at work again this week and needed a burger treat!