Tim Ingledue, a Software Engineer at Farm Credit Services of America, has been working in IT for 19 years. Since moving to Omaha, he’s worked for a few different companies and gained a variety of expertise covering an ever changing industry. Now he’s taking that knowledge and passing it along to Omaha-area children.
Ingledue teaches C# and game development to kids in his spare time as the Founder and Systems Application Architect at Youth In IT, as well as being the Founder of codeCraft and Primary Instructor at the AIM Brain Exchange.
Ingledue says that the technologies being taught at the AIM Brain Exchange are ahead of some of the development tools being taught in colleges.
“A lot of the stuff we’re doing, the schools aren’t doing yet,” said Ingledue. “What the kids are getting is kind of special and unique. Most of them have really blossomed and have really started to explore and do things that I’ve personally thought were really incredible.”
Ingledue said that the intersection of tech and learning brought on by the program really resonates with the kids.
“[In] every class that we have, we all learn new stuff,” said Ingledue. “I learn new stuff and I’m teaching the class.”
Ingledue said the primary focus of the tech program is on teaching coding. The program covers a range of topics, but its mainly focused on the Microsoft technology stack.
“We start off with traditional HTML, CSS, JavaScript, then we translate it over to TypeScript and [students] work on projects using those technologies,” said Ingledue. “Right now we’re doing database work. We spent about a month and a half on T-SQL.”
Students are working together to create a large group database project and then working on smaller development projects in pairs.
“The whole plan is to wrap all this information together so you have a technology platform that can access data and meaningful information, display it to the end user and that end user can take some type of activity off of what they’re seeing,” said Ingledue.
Outside of his work with area youth, Ingledue stays active in Omaha’s broader development community with his Meetup group Omaha Unity 3D.
“It’s a C# game development group. Every month or two, we host meetups talking about game development,” said Ingledue. “We’re walking through the design process […] and then the actual creation of an adventure game.”
In a recent meeting that he hosted, Ingledue said that the group went through the implementation of an an RPG adventure game using C# and the game engine Unity 3D.
Ingledue said that the projects covered in Omaha Unity 3D ultimately serve the same purpose as those in his AIM Brain Exchange courses––opening people up to the wide range of things that can be accomplished with technology.
“It’s really just to bring awareness to different things you can do with technology besides websites, besides standard applications, which makes it fun.”