Code for Albania

The challenge

Albania has no shortage of sharp, curious young people, but modern computer science reaches them unevenly, and rarely in the years when they are deciding what to become. Code for Albania set out to change that: to bring real programming and a creative, problem-solving mindset to high-school students, and to connect them to a global network of models and mentors.

The program

Code for Albania began in 2019. It was built on the Code.X model, born at Stanford University's design school and brought to Albania through the Albanian diaspora network in Silicon Valley, and was run by alphaPlan and Code.X together. Each class of high-schoolers, grades nine through eleven, moved through a three-year cycle of two intertwined tracks, computer science and design thinking, and finished with a project that used technology to solve a real problem. Overlapping cohorts allowed several groups to learn at once.

The three-year cycle

• Year one: Python foundations, and the first design muscles, empathy, comfort with ambiguity, and critique.
• Year two: object-oriented programming and mobile app development, paired with the full design-thinking process and finding real needs with a team.
• Year three: a team capstone app built with real software-engineering practice, and a first taste of entrepreneurship.

One class moves through the cycle over three years:

The design-thinking track runs the same process professionals use:

How it works

The logic is deliberate. Pair Stanford-mentored computer science with a real design-thinking process; sustain it across a year rather than a single camp; and anchor it in a community project. Inputs (mentors and the Code.X curriculum) become activities (camp, mentoring, a project), activities become outputs (students who can code and run a design process), and outputs become the outcome that matters: young people who frame a problem and build for a real person.

Year by year

From the first cohort in Tirana to the Korça chapter, here is how it unfolded. Classes overlap, so a new group starts while earlier ones are still running.

1. 2019TiranaThe first cohort

   Code for Albania launches. Students in grades nine to eleven begin with Python fundamentals and their first design-thinking muscles: empathy, comfort with ambiguity, and giving and receiving critique.

   10 team projects shipped

2. 2020TiranaA virtual summer

   The summer camp moves online during the pandemic. A full autumn-to-spring Python session carries students from variables and loops to data structures, functions and object-oriented programming. A second cohort joins.

   Year 1 moved fully virtual

3. 2021TiranaBuilding for real users

   Year two pairs mobile app development with a full human-centered design project, from user interviews and empathy maps to a paper prototype and testing with real people.

   Cohort 2 shipped mobile apps

4. 2022KorçaThe model travels

   Code for Albania opens in Korça, bringing the same computer-science-plus-design-thinking model to a new city and a new cohort of students.

   213 students applied

5. 2023KorçaA growing chapter

   The Korça chapter continues, deepening the program's roots outside the capital and carrying another cohort through the curriculum.

   51 built at Hack for Albania

6. 2024KorçaSummer and all year

   A two-week summer camp plus a year-round track keep students learning across the whole year, not only the summer.

   114 applied, 57 continued year-round

7. 2025KorçaStill going

   The Korça chapter continues, carrying the program forward with Code.X and alphaPlan running it together, as they have from the start.

   78 students applied

Results

Two cities and a demand that kept compounding, since 2019. The numbers below are drawn from the program's own records.

Applications to the Korça program, running total

Demand kept compounding: more than five hundred applications across four years.

What students built

Every cohort ended in real projects, with students choosing their own problems to solve. The themes ran across:

• Games
• Everyday apps
• Health and wellbeing
• Physical computing
• Community solutions

• A maze game written in Python.
• A parking-spot finder app.
• An Arduino system that runs a set of traffic lights.

Challenges we met

• 2020 arrived mid-program. The summer camp moved fully online and the year-long mentoring held, the cohort continued through a pandemic.
• A year-long commitment is hard for teenagers with school and exams. The bi-weekly rhythm and small groups, each with a teaching assistant, were designed to keep momentum without burning students out.
• Carrying the model to a new city meant rebuilding local operations from scratch in Korça, not simply repeating Tirana.

What we learned

• Pairing code with design thinking makes it stick. Students do not just write programs; they frame a problem and design for a real person.
• A summer intensive followed by year-long mentoring beats a one-off workshop. The long arc is what builds independence.
• The model travels. Taking the program from Tirana to Korça showed it works well beyond the capital.

Does it travel?

By design, yes. The Code.X model was built to move, and had already run in several countries on other continents before it reached Albania. Within Albania, carrying the program from Tirana to Korça proved the same at national scale: the curriculum, the cadence and the mentoring transfer, and only the local operations are rebuilt each time. That transferability is exactly why the materials could become an open platform anyone can learn from.

What it seeded

The curriculum, student projects and unplugged classroom activities developed across these years did not retire with each cohort. They helped shape alphaPlan's open, free, bilingual learning commons. Code for Albania remains an important legacy programme in alphaPlan's history.