When Menlo Park’s Charlotte Acra was 15, she saw a problem she thought had big implications — the small number of girls and minorities in technical and science fields — and set out to do something about it.
A year and a half later, the organization Charlotte founded, Little Miss Code, is completely teen-run and has taught free science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) classes to more than 130 minority students. Classes for students ages 7 to 13 are taught by high school student volunteers in several local communities and in Chicago, with plans to expand internationally to Lebanon this summer.
Charlotte has been so successful that she was invited to give a keynote speech at the first-ever Model UN Youth Summit at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan on April 12.
After her talk, Charlotte said, she was approached by students and officials from a range of African, Asian and European countries who were eager to find out how to emulate her program.
A video made of the event shows UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres of Portugal opening the summit with a plea to the high school and college students in attendance: “My generation has failed in a number of important aspects, the most important of which is climate change. My generation has failed to bring justice and equality. Your generation has to correct that.
“Your generation will be in charge soon. You will need to have an absolutely essential role in rescuing our planet.”
The summit focused on the 17 sustainable development goals United Nations members adopted in 2015 for international implementation by 2030. Many of the universal goals sound nearly impossible to achieve — no poverty, zero hunger, quality education, gender equality and climate action among them.
But Charlotte, a 16-year-old Menlo School junior, has a different view. If you look at all 17 of the goals at once, it can seem overwhelming, she acknowledged, but added, “When you try to break it down to more simple goals, it makes them seem a lot more realistic.”
“I look at it optimistically. I think it can be done by 2030,” she said. “Every small action is important to the bigger goal.”
The rest of the 17 global goal areas are: good health and well-being; clean water and sanitation; affordable and clean energy; decent work and economic growth; industry, innovation, and infrastructure; reducing inequality; sustainable cities and communities; responsible consumption and production; life below water; life on land; peace, justice, and strong institutions; and partnerships for the goals.
Charlotte’s Little Miss Code program works toward three of the goals: gender equality, quality education and reducing inequality, she said.
In her UN speech Charlotte explained, quoting Nelson Mandela, that education “is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world,” and the best way to break a cycle of poverty. “Quality education and equal opportunity go hand in hand,” she said in the speech.
Training more young people in STEM is also important, she said, in helping to solve the “daunting repercussions of climate change and ecological imbalance” her generation has inherited. “We will need as many minds as we can possibly educate and train in these areas of science and technology,” to help find solutions, she said.
“These are the issues that my own generation will have to tackle courageously and intelligently. What we teach today and how many we teach it to” will determine whether the challenges can be met, she said in the speech, and will “bridge the gap between the world we live in and the world as it should be in 2030.”
Little Miss Code is now teaching five different interdisciplinary STEM classes: coding, website design, robotics, design thinking and digital movie making. So far 15 high school volunteers have participated in the program, which, Charlotte said, allows her peers to “recycle the brainpower” they’ve gained through their own education and the abundant technical resources available to them to share with children with fewer resources.
Charlotte writes the curriculum for the Little Miss Code classes herself, making it available to those who are interested. Each student does a “capstone project” as part of the class, and families are invited to the project presentations.
The classes are taught to young students, Charlotte said, in order “to instill in them a love of learning” that will inspire them to continue their schooling.
Little Miss Code started in 2017 with one class at Taft Elementary in Redwood City, but now has expanded to classes at Brentwood Academy in East Palo Alto and classes and summer programs for homeless students at LifeMoves.
Charlotte said in an interview that she first became interested in working with students from East Palo Alto while attending the French International School in Palo Alto, located adjacent to East Palo Alto.
“My parents are both immigrants,” she said, and both are in the tech field. Her mom is from France and her dad from Lebanon. “We talk about these types of global issues all the time at home,” she said.
Charlotte is fluent in French, Spanish and English, and hopes to study international relations or foreign or domestic policy in college, she said.
