Gloria is 12 years old, and this summer she's flying to California to compete at Stanford. She's a student at our partner center in Málaga, Algorithmics España.

It didn't start with anything serious. She was building games in Roblox Studio because it was fun. But somewhere along the way, the games got her hooked on the harder part — the logic, figuring out why something didn't work, fixing it. That's the stuff that stuck.

Now she's headed to the final of the International Logic Olympiad, which is being held on the Stanford campus this year. Not bad for someone who started out making Roblox games in her spare time.

The thing most parents don't realize is that the coding itself was almost beside the point. What Gloria actually learned was how to sit with a problem. Try something, watch it fail, find the bug, try again. She put it better than we could:

"Programming taught me not to give up — and to enjoy hard challenges."

That's really what we're after at Algorithmics. Not kids who can memorize commands, but kids who learn to think their way through things. Gloria's not a one-off. This is what the program is supposed to do.

We'd love for more kids to get the chance she did. We're opening new locations, and we're looking for partners who care about doing this properly. If that sounds like you, get in touch.

Stories like Gloria's are happening all over the world. Read how 8-year-old Mateo brought home two bronze medals from the STEM Olympiad in Rome.