Community Creates “Hacker Hours”

More and more people are coming together to enjoy their love of coding with others. This has taken on the form of a library coding community in the case of a couple of middle school teachers. Gina Sipley and Mercer Hall of EdSurge talk about this in a recent article titled “Turn Your Public Library Into a Kid Coding Community.”

They write, “As lifelong teachers, we assumed the place where we’d feel most comfortable would be in a traditional class setting, so after careful research we signed up for a Back-End Web Development course at General Assembly. While a lot of information was presented during the 10 weeks, what we didn’t anticipate was how important a variety of hybrid learning experiences would be toward helping us truly master the new programming language. After a mixture of classroom lessons, online tutorials, and tutoring sessions, we stumbled upon what many NYC programmers deem the Holy Grail: Hacker Hours. Hacker Hours, a term coined by Aidan Feldman, is a place where programmers of all experience levels gather to help one another with their coding projects. We were so impressed by both the welcoming nature of the participants and the empowering process of intergenerational peer-to-peer instruction that we were eager to bring something similar to our own local community of teenagers. Libraries offer the perfect setting for Hacker Hours since we consider them to be local incubators. We recently piloted a series of free Hacker Hours for teens at the Franklin Square Public Library on Long Island, New York. We organized our meetups over the course of two days in a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environment and welcomed sixteen students. Pitched to children ages 13-18 in the Franklin Square community, the gathering welcomed anyone who wanted to learn programming basics and build a working web app.”

If you’re looking for instruction from experienced teachers who makes their lessons not just informative, but fun, your best bet is CodeRev Kids. Our mission is to provide children with exciting, confidence-building experiences with technology.  Our curriculum covers everything from the basics of MS Windows to each step in programming, app development, game development, and robotics.  Children have fun and build confidence with our program, as well as learn valuable skills that allow them to explore their creativity and build important cognitive skills in the process.

We partner with schools throughout California to deliver a formal, K-10 technology curriculum. Our curriculum integrates common core standards in the computer lab environment and even offer programs geared to specifically teach math and science while teaching and integrating technology.

Whatever youth coding education needs you might have, you can’t go wrong with CodeRev Kids!