It began during his sophomore summer.
Benjamin Standefer ‘26 was working with other philanthropic organizations when he decided to take a stab at making his own — Binary Tree. What he started two summers ago has evolved into a program that has educated over 1200 students across Africa.
For Standefer, programming came easily. His father is a software engineer, so he was exposed to programming as early as middle school. The skill proved valuable, helping him navigate his early years of high school and eventually found Binary Tree.
“We teach digital literacy skills, so everything from how to send professional emails, how to craft a resume, to introductory programming in Python and JavaScript to AI,” Standefer said. “That’s been a really popular subject nowadays.”
The first program began in Tanzania through a preexisting organization that had worked with other American groups in the past. It had 30 students.
“We set up weekly meetings with them where we would call for about an hour,” Standerfer said. “We distilled the curriculum. We had assignments between each meeting, and then we had a culminating project. That culmination was a package deal of some emails, resumes and some digital design products that the students made.”
Standefer’s next goal became clear: expansion. He and his team reached out to other organizations and slowly perfected the “recipe.” There were some variables, like getting French translators for Senegalese students, but they were able to replicate the formula a dozen more times. Now, Binary Tree is looking to teach outside of Africa.
“We actually have a program right now going on in Thailand, which was a chance happening, and it’s not exactly the same age demographic, but it’s working well,” Standefer said. “There’s a push to move into South Asia, to move into South America, anywhere and everywhere in the world to teach.”
Other organizations, including tech startups, universities and academic institutions, have sought out Binary Tree asking how to build a large language model (LLM) or use their curriculum as a model to teach programming in South Africa. They consulted with an organization that reaches 500 public schools over Africa.
“We basically said, ‘This is how we learned how to program. Maybe you could take pieces of our experience and use it to develop a course.’ There are a lot of different directions,” Standefer said. “We got to learn a lot, feature on a couple of podcasts, meet a lot of professors in that part of the world. That all has been really fascinating.”
