 Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Coding Clubs, Youth Programming for Public Libraries. My name is Crystal, and I'll be your host. In just a minute we'll be joined by our guests for today who will share some of the successful programming they've offered. But before we begin, I have just a few announcements to share. Today we'll be using the ReadyTalk platform, and please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will be tracking your questions throughout the webinar, and we'll answer them at the designated Q&A section in the middle and at the end. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas that you'd like to share, we'll forward them back out to the entire group. You don't need to raise your hand to ask a question, simply type it into the chat box. 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Tech training for nonprofit and library staff 101 is a new self-paced online course from TechSoup, which gives you access to short how-to videos, online resources, live events, and features training experts, training plan samples, and more. This course will introduce you to how to manage technology change in your organization, starting with best practices for conducting trainings for adult learners in a variety of formats. Through this course, you will receive samples of successful tech training programs in libraries and nonprofits, as well as a foundation for you to develop a training plan and learning objective for your nonprofit or library's tech training. This course is free, and it's available on TechSoup's new Learning Center at techsoup.course.ct. And we will share that link with you later on and in the archive. Now, if you've just joined us, welcome to today's webinar, Coding Clubs, Youth Programming in Public Libraries. And today, we're joined by three guests who are going to talk about coding clubs in their libraries and in their organizations. Alex Lisperlis joins us from Girls Who Code, a nonprofit that's dedicated to closing the gender gap in technology. Alex works with libraries and other organizations that host Girls Who Code clubs. Anna Cheddar is a teen librarian at the Memorial Hall Library in Andover, north of Boston, Massachusetts, and will share her experience hosting Girls Who Code clubs at the library there. And Deb Baldwin is a librarian at the Piscataway Public Library in New Jersey and has offered Youth Coding Clubs for the past two years using the Google CS First curriculum. So he'll share his experience with us as well. My name is Crystal Schimpf, and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter, we have Jenny Meese and Becky Wiegand from the TechSoup team. And again, we'll be on Twitter using the at TechSoup4Libs handle and the hashtag TS4LIBs. Now we will have time for questions throughout the webinar, so please send us your questions in the chat as they arrive and we'll address as many as we are able to. And also, again, this webinar is being recorded and all of the slides, resources, and materials will be shared in the archive which you will receive by email as soon as it is available. Now one more thing before we get started. We wanted to hear a little bit about your experience and what your experience has been. So tell us, have you offered coding or computer science programs in your library? And just click the radio button next to your selection there to let us know. And then click submit and you'll be able to see the responses of everybody here at that point. And it looks like at this point a majority, well somewhere in the 55% and more range, we'll see where it ends up at the end, but the majority are saying that they have offered some programs related to coding or to computer science. And that's great to see that you're already offering this. There's also a pretty strong group saying, no, we haven't done this yet, so you're coming here to learn about this for the first time perhaps, or to see how you might be able to try this for the first time. And I see a few of you aren't sure and that might mean somebody else in your library has done it, but you're not aware of it yet and that's okay too. And I see some of you are sharing examples in the chat and that's great. We'll try to put some of those out in the chat throughout the webinar today. Now whether you've already done something related to coding and computer science or it's your first time, we hope that you walk away today with some new ideas and some resources for how you may be able to implement a program like this in your library. And so thank you for joining us. And so with that I think I'm going to go ahead and close this poll. It looks like most people have responded now and we're definitely seeing just a bit over 50% of you have offered this in the past, some type of computer science or coding program in the past. Just over 40% have not and a handful of you aren't sure, so excellent. Well let's go ahead and get started then because you're here today to hear from our panelists and we're going to start off with Alex and Anna to talk to us about Girl 2 Code Programming. So Alex, we'll hand it over to you. Hi everyone, so lovely. Thank you to TechSoup for having me and Anna today. I'm really excited to get started. So I just wanted to kind of show you all what I'll be talking about today. I'm going to go over Girl 2 Code, who we are and our mission. I'm going to talk a little bit about what we are achieving so far. And then I'm going to hand it over to Anna from Memorial Hall to talk a bit more specifically about Girl 2 Code and how it's been working at her library. And then I'll tell you a little bit about how you can get involved. So just to get started, what is Girl 2 Code? Our mission as a nonprofit organization is to close the gender gap in technology. So to kind of understand why we exist, it's important to look at the problem. And the problem is really that in a room of 25 software engineers still to this day, only about three of them would be women. And it's really interesting to take a look at where that drop-off happens and where it starts. In middle school, 75% of girls are interested in STEM. But when they get up to college and they choose their major, only about 0.3% of high school girls select that they are intending to major in computer science. So we can kind of see that that gap is happening somewhere in that age range from 6th to 12th grade. And if it persists five years from now, 1.4 million jobs will be open in the computing-related fields. 29% of those are going to be filled by our American graduates, but only 3% will be filled by women. So a lot of us know tech jobs are among the fastest growing in the country, but in a lot of ways girls are being left behind because of this gap. So our solution as an organization is to build the largest pipeline of female engineers in the U.S. And so far I think our results speak for themselves. 65% of clubs' participants say they are considering a major or minor in computer science because of Girl through Code. And there are around 57 top companies that have pledged to hire Girl through Code alumni. So our clubs' programs, some of you may be familiar with our brand and know that we have a summer program, but our clubs' program is actually a much larger part of our programming. And what they are is a free computer science program for 6th through 12th grade girls to explore coding in a fun and friendly environment. These clubs run throughout the academic school year, so they can run after school. On the weekends some of our schools host them during the school day. And they are hosting a variety of sites including libraries, community centers, colleges, and middle and high schools. For this upcoming year we are still heavily getting applications every day, but we have over 800 clubs across 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Guam. So it's very exciting. So what do our clubs' programs teach? So girls are going to be learning through a project-based coding curriculum. They are going to have access to role models and tech industry exposure through the connections that our organization tries to foster with our partner companies as well as through connections that your own club will make to people in your area or your community who are in the tech industry. And then that last component is the sisterhood community and alumni network. So the girls are joining an alumni network of about 10,000 girls across the country. Last year 6,000 of those girls were Girls Who Code club students. So they will have access to internship opportunities and summer opportunities through being part of that network. Overall girls are going to grow both hard skills in computer science and build those 21st century soft skills like collaboration, presentation, and public speaking, and that idea of building their network. To become a Girls Who Code host site one needs to be an employee at the host site. And they need to be able to provide internet, laptops, and computers for each girl, space, a room where the club can meet, and then the sponsor is going to act as a point of contact for our organization. Girls Who Code provides the online curriculum which I'll show you a snapshot of in a moment. And also there's a PDF one pager that dives a little deeper that we'll try to send out to you guys after this webinar in the archives. There is technical and logistical support to the volunteer facilitators as well as the sponsors. And there are also toolkits in our online resources to recruit and engage members of your club. I'm seeing a great question that I realized I also left off. Someone's asking how large clubs typically are. So just for some context, clubs are anywhere from five girls to 40 girls. They're typically between 10 and 20, but I've seen clubs on the smaller side and on the larger side. This is a quick snapshot of our online curriculum. It lives on a platform called Canvas. And once you go through our process to host and become a club, your facilitators, the teachers of your club will be added to this platform and the girls will be added to this platform. This is where they'll be working on their projects. I also wanted to quickly include just an example of a really cute project that came out of former Girls Who Code clubs student work. So this was a project called Angry Girls. And on the right you can sort of see what the game looked like and it involved a moving character up through different levels. And level one was cat calling to make a whistle, shout, or comment of sexual nature to a woman passing by. So this girl clearly wanted to teach people about some of the challenges of moving through the world as a young woman, as a girl. But she also wanted to make a game and something that was fun and really engaging. And at the bottom you can see her quote, Empowering Girls One Level at a Time, which I really love. So I'm going to hand it over to Anna to talk a little bit more about how Girls Who Code has been happening at her library. Thanks, Alex. Hi, I'm Anna. You can see here a picture of my beautiful library north of Boston here in Andover. So I just wanted to share a little bit about how Girls Who Code works here at my library. It's our second year. So I'm going to talk a little bit about things for other librarians to think about like space, community resources, your staff registration and support from your admin and community, everyone else. So at our library, like I said, we're north of Boston. We have a really great opportunity in that we are close for commuters who work in Boston and places like Harvard, MIT, and all the sort of tech hub that is Boston. But there's also some great technology companies up here in our town like Raytheon and Rockstar Games as well. So we have actually a really great community of people who are available to help us with coding. So we have done coding programs in the past. We've had a strong interest, but it has been mostly boys. We've done such things as the Hour of Code and other general coding programs. But again, until we started doing Girls Who Code, I had 75, 80% boys in my programs, which is great, but I wasn't to see the girls. So last year was our first year for Girls Who Code, and we had 40 applicants for 12 spots in our program. This year I just did the registration. Again, we had 30 applicants for 12 spots. So it means that not every girl is able to come to our Girls Who Code club. And it's sad, but at every library you can only do what you can do. There's only so much you can do. I wish we could run multiple sections of the club, but we can only do one on Saturday mornings. So right now that's where we're at. And I also wanted to show a little bit about our registration process. We have a two-part registration aiming for fairness because again, there is a great response, and I have only so many spots. So I first do the contact and contract information form just so that I can get their contact information. And then here on the next slide, a lot of libraries use something called EventKeeper to register patrons for all library events. You can set up EventKeeper so that it does a registration at a specific time. So I did that. So then once that program opens, I took the first 12 girls who had also filled out my informational survey just so that I had all of their information and contact and that type of thing. And finally, I'm just going to show you a little bit of my space. The picture is a bit dark, but you can see half of my computers in my team room here. We have 12 desktop computers that are maintained by our systems librarian here at Memorial Hall, who is really great. So since Girls Who Code does require that you have computers and Internet for all of your club members, we have 12 computers so we can have 12 girls. I can fit in a few more girls on laptops if I needed to, but my space, we are limited by space. It's not a technical computer lab, but it's a really lovely space. It's open. There's room. We can set up a little projector and a screen. So it just goes to show that if you think you maybe can't do Girls Who Code because you're saying, oh, I don't have a computer lab, you don't have to have a computer lab. You can use even just computers that you have. You could use laptops in an activity room or something like that, a portable projector and screen. It's a really flexible program that allows you to sort of make it work for your library, how you can make it work. We have had to make some adjustments for teens using the room on Saturday mornings. I have sort of a group of regular gamers who come in and use the room. After a few Saturdays they get used to the fact that they won't be able to use that room on Saturday mornings from 9.30 to 11.30. And they're okay with that. They can use the other computers in our library. And finally I just wanted to say that we've had really great administration support supporting us in this journey of doing Girls Who Code. And they've been really excited about it and our community in general has been very excited. So I'll send it back to Alex. Thank you so much, Anna. That was awesome and really exciting to really see inside one experience of one of our library host sites. I wanted to kind of summarize a little bit for everyone what we really see are the benefits of hosting a Girls Who Code Club in your library. So I think for the girls, the middle and high school girls it's access and exposure through the free programming that is within their community and accessible to them. And the diverse mentors and role models that this club can potentially become a hub for exposing the girls to. And then for the library I think it's an opportunity to host a fun, again free program to younger members of your library and to engage them more in maybe other programs that you have going on there or just engage them a little deeper than maybe they typically would coming in to check out a book or participate in a one-off program. And then it's also another opportunity to engage volunteers in the library in a new way consistently over the year and the semester. So just to recap or to go a little deeper rather, ways to get involved in a club. So you can sign up to host a Girls Who Code Club. You need to identify a sponsor and obviously secure the space and the tech that we talked about in the first part of our presentation. That sponsor again just needs to be an employee at the library. The second option is sort of to become the sponsor and to facilitate your club. So I didn't, you know, it was my bad, I did not correctly kind of review what a facilitator is, but I know Anna talked a little bit about who works with her club students. But the facilitator is what we call the instructor of the club and it is a volunteer position. So this second option is if you are someone who wants to both be the sponsor of your club, that point person as well as be there with the club every meeting to support them as they work through the curriculum. So for those of you that have a tech background, you would go through a normal application process. It's four parts that includes a small content quiz and obviously your information and a quick background screening. If you do not have a technical background, but you're interested in learning alongside your students, there is a pilot program that we're running this fall. And I've reserved some, I've sort of bookmarked some spots for participants in this webinar who might want to get involved. It is, the registration for that pilot program is going to be coming to a close, probably the end of this week or early next week, but you can go and begin your application as normal. And when you see wording in the application about the pilot program, you will opt in to the pilot program. And then just really important to note that starting in the spring, so in January 2017, anyone is going to be able to facilitate a Girls Who Code club. So if you are looking to sign up now, but you'd like to launch your club at that time when anyone can host and anyone, sorry, anyone can facilitate, you can submit your application now and just put a start date of spring 2017. And then this third note is just about becoming a Girls Who Code partner. So I know that some of the people on this call might be library system administrators or involved at sort of the upper levels of multiple library systems or branches. And so if your system or your community sets up three or more Girls Who Code clubs, you are a candidate to become one of our community organization partners, and those partners have unique benefits. And if that's something you're interested in, my contact information is included in the rest of the slides. So these are just the important dates to know for this year's clubs. The hosting application is on a rolling basis through the end of next month. The non-technical pilot, as I said, is running this month through the end of the semester. And then the clubs will launch this fall as well as into next spring. And then that last note is just generally we have clubs running through June of 2017 for the year. This is a note about facilitating that, recruiting that facilitator. So we do provide support and materials for that recruitment, and it is the primary responsibility of the host site. We often find the great places to start are reaching out to the colleges or universities in your area if they have a computer science department, a math department, even a community college that might have a growing IT program, posting on social media groups, and the flyers as well as just generally reaching out to your network. We see a lot of success in finding people interested to share their knowledge of coding with young women. So I just wanted to say thanks, I'm going to throw it back over to Crystal to move us along. Well, Alex and Anna, thank you for sharing this part of the presentation so far, and really a lot of detail, and I know there's a lot more detail that could go into how Girls Who Code works, and this is really just kind of an overview at this point, but you've really given us a lot to understand how this program might work. And I can tell people are interested because we've been getting a lot of questions, and what we're going to do right now is take a few minutes to answer what we can of those questions, and then come back later to get back to some more questions later on in this session. Now one of the biggest things I think would be worth clarifying right now, and Alex I want to ask you this first, is can you go over how long each session of a club runs, and how frequently do they need, and how long is each session intended to be to go along with the Girls Who Code curriculum? I'm actually going to let Anna maybe give us an example of how her club works because it's very case by case. Many host sites do it differently, so maybe she could share with us how they've done it, and then I can sort of tell you the range as well. Great, and that's I think part of the question is if there is a range, then Alex will come back to you after that to get what that range might be. So Anna, how about you tell us first, what was the frequency of your club? Sure, so we meet once a week on Saturday mornings from 9.30 to 11.30 a.m., so two hours a week in that sort of two-hour chunk. I know the facilitators do a little break after an hour because it is 9.30 in the morning and they're 13, 14-year-old girls, so it's awesome that they're up early. And we do that from October to June. We take some Saturdays off for holidays and school vacation weeks, but it's most every Saturday. Great, and Anna, one of the people who had asked a question about this timing was wondering if you found it to be time intensive for you as a library staff member to put this on because I know of course we all have limited time. So did you find the time to be a challenge? Only for the first sort of admin stage when it's doing info sessions about Girls Who Code. I do two of those in August. And then the sort of just organizational part is busy maybe in September, but once the club gets started and we have the facilitators, I just check in to make sure everything is running fine, and it kind of just runs itself. It's amazing. Excellent. And Alex, as far as the range of what you're seeing in other libraries, Yeah, so I think that for the most part, libraries tend to meet for longer chunks of time once a week, so closer to that one hour, one hour and a half, some of them meet for two hours, you know, Saturday morning. But it's basically just important to know that there's about 40 hours of curriculum. We say at minimum a girl would need eight weeks to sort of glean new skills from working with the curriculum, and so that includes, and there's a little more information about this in the one pager about our curriculum, but there's a culminating, it's called a CS Impact Project, and so they need basically a minimum of eight weeks to complete an impact project. The curriculum is very self-directed, however, and so, you know, if a girl, one girl comes every single week for, you know, the whole year and the two hours, she's just going to be working at a different level than her neighbor who maybe comes fewer times or joins in the spring as opposed to the fall. All right. And so good insight there into the scheduling of this and how there is some flexibility and adaptability built in. Now, Alex, one of the questions that we've gotten, and coming especially from libraries that want their programs to be very inclusive, we've actually had this question from several people, is how do libraries go about offering a coding club that is targeted towards girls and is this an exclusively girls program or is it, you know, could you just talk a little bit more about how this is targeted towards girls and how libraries might be able to approach that and get administration support? Yes, of course, and I did want to, I mean, for some context because I have encountered this question a lot. I am happy to provide data and qualitative and quantitative information for libraries interested in getting the program started for, you know, the number of libraries that we have across the country doing our program. So I know that it obviously varies place to place, but we do have an entire library system on the West Coast that participates in our programs even though generally libraries, public institutions do not, I know, favor single-gendered programming. So the way that we work with this is we say that boys are, of course, allowed to participate in the club. We do ask that the club stay a majority of female participants or female-identified participants. It needs to be called a girl-to-code club and use our curriculum. And we just find that in general if all of these things sort of stay true that boys tend to just not opt in as often. So it's a very similar idea of girls just not opting in that often to STEM programming or coding programs. We are creating an environment that is catering to them. Excellent. Well, at this point we're going to keep moving and want to hear from Doug who is going to present a very different or somewhat different type of coding club experience that he's had. But Alex, thank you for responding to these questions so far. I know you are possibly going to try to answer some of these questions in chat as well and we'll have time at the end to follow up with more questions. And Anna will bring you back on at the end as well to answer some more questions. So thank you both for being here and for sharing your experience and your program. And now Doug, I'm going to hand things over to you now and let you talk about your library's coding clubs for the past few years. Great. Great. Thank you. And thanks everyone for joining us this afternoon. Again, my name is Doug Baldwin. I'm from the Piscataway Public Library. Our library is a two-branch library system located in Central New Jersey. We serve about 56,000 residents. Our service population is pretty diverse in pretty much every category from age to racial identification, socioeconomic. So we pretty much have a little bit of everything. The one claim to fame that I'm always supposed to sort of throw out there when it comes to our library, which always makes me chuckle a little bit, is that we were the first library in New Jersey to launch a makerspace. So we've had a makerspace in our library since 2013. And that's right before I came on board. And so by having a space such as that sort of tied into our strategic plans and goals, the library sort of serves in providing a variety of different types of stem enrichment opportunities for all ages. So it's sort of part of what we do as far as our sort of newly acclimating identity. So I guess for us, why computer science and coding? For us in particular, our community has a very strong interest in stem enrichment amongst our patrons, but specifically for K to 12. So we hear anecdotes and we've heard all kinds of different stories about wanting more stem types of offerings in a variety of different formats. So there's definitely sort of that public demand for that. We also have had specific encoding and computer language-based requests for adults as well as for young people. So again, it's just a lot of feedback that we've received as far as being able to try and offer these types of things. For us also it is, and as I'm sure it is for many of you about expanding our sort of definition and our addressing digital literacy in regards to uses of different types of technology. And I guess finally the one big thing for us and might be sort of the driving force behind this interest is that we're sort of strategically located. It sort of sounds like similar to our previous speaker where we have a lot of tech companies that are located close to us in Piscataway. We have Rutgers University, our state university just down the road. We have offices for Samsung and for IEEE nearby. So not only do we have a lot of families and parents and folks that got there working at these places, but we sort of have that communal sort of history of serving technology needs. So we did want to offer some kind of computer science or coding. We looked at some of the challenges first, specifically things like staff knowledge and expertise. We don't have anybody on staff that knows a lot of coding. I'm probably the one who may know the most and I probably know less than maybe many of you. So there's that and sort of want to be able to offer quality content but not having to have an expert. Of course things like cost, so do we have enough equipment? Do we have laptops and things like that that we would need to be offer those kinds of programs? How do we look at the frequency? We've seen a couple questions about that. How long do you offer sessions? How long are the sessions going to be? Are you going to offer it in a series of sort of one-off? Those are the kinds of things that we were sort of grappling with like many of you. What was going to be our target audience? For us, most of the teams quote unquote that we get are really sort of the upper middle school, lower high school students. So that's really sort of our target audience. And then of course those content choices and approaches, what's going to sort of work best not only for us as a library but in serving the needs that our community is asking about. So we did ultimately go and choose to do our computer science program through the Google CS first curriculum. And I've listed a bunch of reasons which I'll just very quickly go through as far as why we chose Google CS. First of all, there was a sort of low to no expertise entry point. These computer science clubs can be run by someone who has almost or even no computer science background or coding background at all. It's designed to be run that way. There's ways that you can sort of enhance that if you do have that background but the club itself is sort of curriculum based so that anybody can run it. Speaking of the curriculum, it's got a full content curriculum and materials. They basically provide you with everything that you need. And I'll quickly go into that in our next slide where I talk about literally everything that you would need. They have really easy to use admin web tools. So from being able to create the accounts that the kids will need, we go track their progress to providing some really nice web tools that you can use during your club sessions. They really provide a lot of really nice tools that you can utilize to sort of keep yourself organized and keep club organized. It's entirely browser based. There's no downloads. There's no installation of IDs, integrated development environments that you might need for other sort of traditional programming languages, things like that. It's all done in the browser because we're basically working with these scratch software which many of you may be familiar with. It's also very scalable. So in other words, you can determine how much time and content you want to cover in a club, how long you want your sessions to be, how many sessions you'd like to have. And we'll go into that in a moment. It's a computer science based pedagogy which I really like. So there's a lot out there as far as coding that's very sort of syntax based and sort of in some ways can be abstract. I really like the content here because what it's doing is sort of providing foundationally computer science concepts terms and content that can really be carried over and built upon if you're going into really any type of computer language or any kind of development in those ways. So I really like sort of the foundational aspect of it. The themes were really great. So that's sort of the hook that we were able to really use to sort of market these and get these to kids sort of in a fun way. And we'll talk a little bit how we sort of did some work with the themes to try and get a higher female representation. And then it really did suit our target audience. So I mentioned that we get this sort of upper middle school, lower high school for sort of our teen group. And this is right in the 9 to 14 age range as far as the content is designed for. So it just really fit where you were trying to doing. And everything they provide is absolutely free. There's absolutely no cost to run this club as long as you have some of the basic technical resources that you would need which we'll go into in a moment. So in a snapshot how it works is that they provide up to 8 sessions of content. The content is basically a mix of 4 to 5 short videos that walk the kids through creating different projects each session. Basically each video they're going to be creating a short code stack. You see an example of a code stack on your right from scratch that leads them through to ultimately they've created a particular project. And then there's other content called add-ons. If you have kids that are moving at a quicker pace they can do these add-ons to sort of embellish upon the projects that they've built. Facilitators they're the guide activity. You're not teaching them how to code. That's what the videos are sort of theirs to provide the content. The facilitators are keeping time. They're coming around and addressing questions and they're sort of organizing the club. The sessions can run anywhere from 45 to 75 minutes. When you're actually setting up your club they actually ask you to put in the times and you're going to do it, the dates, the sessions, things like that and they sort of organize you around that. So your sessions can be sort of anywhere within that range. The content is progressive so it's going to start off with something that some kids might even find very simple but it does quickly start to move along and introduce additional concepts. So by the second or third week they are creating some fairly complex projects depending on their sort of exposure to scratch in the past. There are some really nice assessment tools that are associated with this so it's keeping track of their projects, how many videos they've gone through. It provides assessments at the end for answering specific questions related to the content and that's all electronic. So as the admin, as the club facilitator, you have access to all your student accounts. You have access to all their assessments. You can see how they're progressing. You can see how they're answering their questions, things like that. It also uses a badging system to reward completion of sessions each week so they get basically a sort of like a book paper passport and then you give them stickers each week that they're able to put into this passport as they move along. And then finally the part that I really like is they build a showcasing element into this so that each week that the kids are coming back, the first thing that they do is there's two randomly chosen participants that are going to showcase and talk about the projects they built a week before, how they work, and then show them off to the rest of the club before you get started with the next session. As I mentioned with technical needs, it is a one-to-one computer to participant program. So how many students or how many participants you have in the program is going to be based on how many computers you have accessible. There really is not as much flexibility in regards to this particular curriculum when it comes to that. So it really does have to be one student to one computer. They will have these headphones. They're going to be watching videos. They're going to be going at a different pace so you don't want them doing it through the computer speakers. You want to have a pencil and post-it pad. They use basically a post-it system which I actually did employ at those really nice where you basically write down if you have a question or you can just put your post-it right on your monitor, and then the facility can come over and take the post-it down and answer questions. It sort of keeps a good pace to the workshop and doesn't have them all sort of either raising hands or getting a little hectic when it comes to the content. This is a good way to sort of have organization that way. You do need good internet access for this. So again, that's something you sort of can't get around. So that's something you would have to address if this was something that you were interested in. And then finally you would need someone to facilitate here. We have myself and another librarian that served as facilitators, but you would need an adult facilitator for the program. So to get started in doing a Google CS Club you would need a Google account. The facilitator would need one. Once you add a Google account then you can go onto their website which I provide at the end. And basically there's a button that says Start a Club. You click on it and you start to fill out the information including dates and times. You're going to offer it, which theme you'd like to choose and filling out some additional information. You can look at the different themes, review those models, see which one you'd like to offer. Then you're going to go back creating that club online. And then what they'll do is they'll ask you if you want them to send you sort of the box of resources that you can use for your club. Includes the actual passports, includes the stickers, includes the written club plans, which is basically like a, it's literally like a, you can read from the script kind of thing. I don't follow the script exactly, but if you're that type of person that would maybe just need to sort of build your comfort level you can literally just read right from the script if you wanted to to run each session. And then they provide you also with solution sheets for each of those code stacks that the kids are going to be working on. So when you do get those questions and they come around you've got sort of a solution sheet that you can work from. They send you all that in a box. It's also available digitally through your Access Portal, which is a screenshot over here. You'll see there's different icons on here that show the different digital access that you have to all your tools and materials. Then obviously you're going to want to promote your club, get your registrants however you would normally do that. I can always certainly provide recommendations as far as how we've done it. If that's something that people are interested in, then I always suggest doing a dry run. And that can be just you going through the first week's content and materials and just sort of practicing the timing of how everything is going to sort of take place. You can do that with maybe another staff member or you can even really do that yourself just to sort of get acclimated with the club model. And then really just jump in and have a lot of fun. It really was a lot of fun two years that we've done it and which is why I really do so highly recommend it. So some unique features for our club. We did ours mostly from laptops. So we did it over Wi-Fi. We didn't have too much problems. Again, we did have a strong internet connection. So that did help us out. But we did it basically through laptops. As far as the headphone situation, we didn't have headphones for them. So I just really went on Amazon. I got some basically a cheap pack of like 100 earbuds for about maybe like $8. And then we got a separate pack of the reusable earbud sponges that you can replace. So we were just able to, if your buds didn't work or we had to sign new earbuds, then we could just replace sponges on there and we could reuse earbuds if we had to. We did require registrants to come to all sessions. But we did provide basically a two session sort of excused absence. That was sort of an experiment on our part the first year. We weren't sure how it was going to go, but we really wanted to sort of, I guess put a little bit of social pressure there just to make sure that in getting these kids to come to something that was going to be a series which we've never really done all that often that we could try to get them to continue to come back. And we'll look at some of our numbers later on to see sort of how that went. But that was sort of our registration model. We took as many kids as we could get laptops for. Our clubs generally hover between about 13 and 15 participants. We did utilize a tool that they have which is the randomized showcase selector which I mentioned before for kids to showcase their projects. And then they also have a nice web-based session timer that you can use to sort of keep you on track and keep your club on track as you're moving through the materials. Finally, for the second year, not so much the first year, but the second year we started to incorporate Finch robots. I don't know how many people are familiar with those, but I can put the URL for them in the chat box later. But we wanted to add a little something extra to our club. So what we did was because these particular robots can be programmed with Scratch, we let them work for the first couple of weeks within their particular curriculum lessons. Now what we did was we started to split the time where we basically cut it down instead of an hour and a half. We cut it down to about an hour and 20 minutes. And then they gave them the last 15 or 20 minutes to actually take some of the skills that they were building through the Google CS and apply them to actually controlling and utilizing them with these robots just to sort of have an added element to what they were learning. And they really did enjoy it. The thing it did was it sort of kept them on pace. So what we would do is basically say, you know, if you sort of get, you know, sort of focus and get through your curriculum for today, the robots sort of served as a reward for them afterwards. Because we did have a couple of kids that sort of, you know, we're getting caught up and not necessarily going through the lessons at the pace that is needed to get through each thing. While we are very flexible when it comes to that, we also want to make sure that they're getting as much content with us as possible. So this sort of reward system helped to get some of them on track. One other thing we did is we also sent a weekly email to parents. Most of the kids were registered by their parents, so we got emails out to them. And we were sort of covering the content each week and sending that out to them. So as far as our numbers, you can kind of get a sense from these two tables here. We had a really good retention rate, which we were actually really shocked to see. We were not expecting that. So we did six sessions the first year, eight sessions the next year. We added a second facilitator on to the second year, which really did help as far as sort of actually just running the club and working the logistics that were there. So just some very quick things that we learned. It just really worked great for us, implementing the curriculum the way that they had it designed. We did learn sort of time management and how to better manage the time that was being utilized during the club sessions, making sure that we kept consistent with our reminders to the participants as far as keeping them on track as they're working through their exercises and definitely encouraging teamwork. We used the inquiry method as far as getting kids to sort of try to answer their own problems or questions when they had them. But we also highly encouraged their neighbors and friends to also help each other out. And that really did a lot as far as sort of building confidence between the different kids that were in there. And then tech sometimes fails. It just does, but it's okay because they provide you with a separate set of exercises that you can do if your Internet is not working at all. Basically, unplugged coding exercises that we actually did have to do the first year once or twice, and they were actually a lot of fun to do. So we learned a lot in the process as well. And in keeping with time, these are just a couple examples of different programs and different exercises that our kids built using things like events, conditions, variables, loops, a lot of sort of the traditional coding and computer science components that we want them to learn. So that's pretty much what I have. And thank you everyone again. Excellent. Doug, thanks for sharing your experience, again with the Google CS first curriculum. We did put that link in the chat and we'll include it in the archive. And also I know you had to go through those last couple of examples very quickly, but I will remind everybody joining us that you'll get a link to the slides and can take a quicker, closer look at those actually once you get the archive. But we want to take a few questions now before we wrap up for the day at the top of the hour. And Doug, I just wanted to go back to the fact that you had a club where you had both girls and boys, and you really worked in the second round to bring more girls in and had a couple of people asking, how did you encourage the girls to join? And also what did the ratio end up being? I think that was something we went over a little quickly. So if you could go back to that. Sure, absolutely. So Crystal's right. So the second year we did want to make a conscious effort to try to entice more girls to be part of our computer science club. The first year was about a 70-30 ratio with 70% being boys. So what we did was we knew we were going to use the Google CS curriculum again. So what we tried to do was, the first thing we did was try to choose a theme that we thought might be more attractive to girls and might sort of hit them where their interests might be, which is why we did choose the fashion and design theme the second year around. The other thing we did was sort of some targeted emailing. So I run other STEM programs here at the library and we sort of coordinated with our children's and teen department. And so we did try to sort of, not to be exclusive of boys per se, but we did try to make sure that we had as many girls on those targeted email listings as possible when we were sending out the promotion to the parents and things like that. And the ratio did actually wind up turning the second year. So we actually had a 60-40 ratio of girls to boys, which we were really happy with considering that we didn't really make an over-conscious effort to do it, but tried to do it a little more subversive. So those are some of the things that we sort of did within our program, and we were sort of pleased with that. And I'm sorry, what was the other part of the question, Crystal? No, I think you got to. It was just how you encouraged people, girls especially, to join and what the ratio was. So you got that. And then another person had asked, with the Google CS First curriculum, are there a lot of different themes to choose from? You mentioned a few, but did you feel like you had a lot of choices to work with? There's a good amount of choices. I believe the first year we did it, there were eight choices. There are now, I believe, 12 or 13. This is not something that's static. This is something that they are continuing to build curriculum for. So new themes are being added each year. So I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, by the end of the year or even beginning next year, you saw anywhere from like 15 to 16. But no, there are definitely a lot of, I think, really nice choices. And they really run the gamut from things like social media, to storytelling, to sports, to, you know, the video game fashion design. And one that sounds quickly much about the content is that they really do a really nice job of taking the content that we're applying real-world situations to them, because it is video-based. They can sort of do that. So for instance, with the fashion theme, they did tie in sort of how the different projects the kids would be building sort of emulated actual things that they say did on runways or did with e-textiles and costumes and things like that. And they do that with all their themes, which I thought was a really nice element. Excellent, excellent. Well, Doug, thank you for sharing your experience. We are going to see just two different types of coding clubs today, Girls Who Code and also the Google CS First from two different libraries. So thanks to Anna and Doug for sharing their experiences in their libraries with us and Alex for sharing the details about the Girls Who Code program in particular. We are just about out of time, so what I'm going to do is move to wrap up here and say that if you did ask a question and we were not able to answer it during the session today, we actually will follow up with you via email within a few days, and there were so many good questions and we want to get you those detailed and accurate answers. And I just want to kind of acknowledge maybe a note to end on is that one of the themes I saw running through this and a lot of questions we got were about how do you encourage the involvement of kids in these programs, youth in these programs? And it just seems like the common thread has really been that both of these examples really thought about what the youth were interested in and tried to tailor a program around their interests and really get them involved in that. So it's great to hear those examples. Thanks again, all of you for sharing your experience today. Just a couple of announcements before we wrap up and I'll just ask for those of you who joined us today to stay on the line to take a brief survey and tell us what you thought about today's webinar. But you might also be interested to know what's coming up in October. We have a library-specific webinar on October 20th talking about broadband planning for libraries and there's going to be a special section on E-rate 2.0, so if that interests you or might interest someone else at your library please pass that along. And also on Tuesday, October 25th we'll have a webinar on data visualization with a tool called Tableau. And so you can learn more about that and check the TechSoup website for the registration details and more information on those webinars. And lastly, this was a TechSoup for Libraries webinar and if you haven't been to TechSoupforLibraries.org we hope that you'll visit us there. We have a monthly newsletter, a blog with technology-based information specific to the needs of libraries and a whole host of other things there including our library webinars in archived format. So please visit us at TechSoupforLibraries.org. Well, that's all we have for you today. Thanks for joining us and tuning in to talk about coding clubs and libraries and we'll get that archive out to you within a few days. Thanks to Alex, Anna, and Doug for sharing their experience in today's program and we hope you all have a wonderful day. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.