Thing 11 continued

Last night we hosted our parent "Hour of Code" night. As mentioned in a previous post our enrichment teacher has been teaching code with each of the grade levels in our elementary school. We wanted the parents to experience what their children were doing at school and share with them the exciting opportunity that coding could provide for their children.

In deciding how this was going to be set up, our enrichment and technology coordinator, along with our principal decided that it would be best to do it on a night that there was a PTSO meeting going on so that we would already have an audience. The parents from the PTSO meeting then attended the "Hour of Code" afterwards. Everyone came to the library after the meeting (students included) and we used the site that we use at school with the children called code.org. There are some wonderful videos on the site and we shared one of those videos in the beginning. Parents learned about the current and future job market that is available for people that can code. Several parents commented on how valuable they saw this being and wanted to know how this was being carried out once the students went to high school. It was really nice that they were able to see the benefits and showed interest in it.

Once they were finished watching the video the parents began one of the courses that the students take at school and they were able to receive a certificate at the end of the hour. I walked around and helped parents and teachers, along with members of the technology department and the enrichment teacher. It was really fun, challenging and rewarding for both parents, and students that attended. I think it was worthwhile and I hope that we are able to offer it again in the Spring when it isn't so close to the holidays and more families can attend.

If anyone wants to learn more about how we hosted our parent night or code.org, I would be happy to share more information with you. It is really exciting and I feel lucky that we are able to provide coding at our school.