 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, an online show that terminology is up for discussion amongst the people that do these kind of things. But whatever you want to call us, whatever you put us into, we are live here every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record our shows every week and post them onto our website afterwards. And I'll show you that at the end of today's show where you can see all our recordings and watch them later. Both the show, the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with any of your colleagues, friends, family, anybody you might know who might be interested in any of our topics. Send them to our website. They can sign up for our live sessions or watch any of our recordings. And we do have our recordings from all the way going back when we first started the show in January 2009. So there's a lot of old stuff on there, yes, many things that you would be considered out of date or no longer relevant. But we just keep everything out there for archival purposes, so do keep that in mind when you're looking at some of the older shows. They might be a little, you know, have information that have changed or things like that. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, many training sessions, interviews, demos of things. Basically our only criteria is that it's somehow library related. So something that libraries are doing, something that could give interest to libraries, some new services or products that we wanted to show you how they work. So pretty broad. You'll see some things that might not sound like they have anything to do with libraries, but that's a little, you know, think outside the box. Trust us. Watch the show. Watch the recording. Everything gets connected to libraries somehow in the end. We have a Nebraska Library Commission staff here. We are the host of the show that do sessions sometimes. But we also bring in guest speakers, and that's what we have this morning. To my left is Marvel Merring, who is from the Omaha Public Library just north of Lincoln here. And it says I've got the branch manager at one of the specific libraries. Yeah, the South Omaha Library. Right. They have multiple branches up there in Omaha. And she's going to talk to us this morning about coding with kids in the library, which is very fun. We've had lots of different shows about this from different angles and different programs and robotics and all sorts of things. But this is one that we have not had anything on about doing these specific coding events like you guys have done at Omaha Public. So she's going to tell us all about that this morning. So I'll just hand over to you. Great. Go ahead and take it away and tell us what you guys are doing up there. Thank you so much. Okay. You may have your mouse to get there. There we go. All right. Well, thank you for letting me be here today to talk about coding. This is something that's really exciting for me. I've enjoyed being a part of a coding initiative at the Omaha Public Library. And two and a half years ago, I knew nothing about computer coding. And I'm going to talk today about some initiatives that we were involved in at the Abraham's Branch, which was the branch that I started at at the Omaha Public Library three years ago. I just recently moved to the South Omaha Library and they're very different branches. So I'll talk a little bit about some of the unique aspects of working with your particular community in coding. How this began in the fall of 2014, the Sage family out of the blue gave us a check for $10,000. Yeah, we were stunned and so grateful for their generosity. And they told us we could use it any way we choose. So we thought long and hard about what would be the most meaningful way to spend the money. And we had several ideas. One of the ideas that we were thinking about was an aquaponics garden because if you've been to the Abraham's Branch or are familiar with it, it has a beautiful window that's an entire wall of window. And as we kind of started thinking about it, there were some other funds that we were going to be able to use for gardening projects. And so the director said, let's come up with another idea. So as I started doing a little bit of research, I thought, you know, we really do need to be offering coding at our library. So that's how we came to the idea. And my service area when I worked at the Abraham's Branch, it's very diverse racially and economically. Educationally, it's also diverse. There are many traditionally school kids and then many, many homeschoolers. That was an audience that we really wanted to tap into. And we also have a significant number of families that don't have access to the Internet. So there's some growing poverty in that service area that we needed to be able to address. The branch that I'm at now is in the South Omaha. It's the South Omaha Library. It's a unique library because it's also a hybrid academic and public library. We share the space with the Metropolitan Community College. It's also in an area of town that's primarily Hispanic with a great many refugees and immigrants that have settled in that area. There's also a significant number of families without Internet. And there's also significant poverty and crime, a lot of gang activity unfortunately. So when we thought about coding, it was like why coding? And Anthony Cuthbertson says this about coding. Code powers our digital world. Every website, smartphone app, computer program, calculator, and even microwaves relies on code in order to operate. This makes coders the architects and builders of the digital age. In other parts of the world, coding is actually considered a new literacy. In Britain and Estonia, coding is compulsory in the public school system. And Singapore is also going to follow in that direction. But in the United States, it still remains marginalized through the K-12 education system. And a few statistics here. Only one in four schools in the U.S. teach computer science. Only 5% of high schools in the United States offer advanced placement in computer science. And only 32 states allow students to count computer science towards high school graduation. This last statistic actually did improve over in the last year. So that's good to know. Surprisingly, Arkansas is one of the leaders in mandating computer coding in the K-12 classroom. And it actually beats out California and New York. So they have a requirement that all public and charter high schools offer computer science. It's not mandatory, or the kids are not required to take them. But it is available. It's so strange hearing these statistics. I remember when I was in, I think I've been junior high school. Just a long time ago. In the 80s. I took a computer coding class. I did. We did a thing, and obviously I don't think it was required. But I took some sort of class. I remember coding and designing some sort of animated stuff on the screen. Like very 8-bit type looking stuff. But it was a class that we were able to take way back then. So actually, I've heard, this is something, I do know that this is that it's not, and a lot of places aren't doing it. And I find it very strange that at some point it was becoming big. I don't know if it was the beginning of stuff like the gaming, and Atari and things were coming out. And so they were like, ooh, let's latch onto that. And then maybe it faded away. I think that's absolutely right. From what I've heard from my friends that are in coding, are the number of graduates that we're putting out into the workforce, and is less than it was like 10 years ago. And I'm not quite sure why. And according to the National Science Foundation, fewer computer science majors than 10 years ago, and that percentage is shrinking for women, which is really sad. And there are currently 525,293 open computing jobs nationwide, and we only graduated 42,969 students into the workforce. And that's kind of a recent statistic, too, from Code.org. And of course, unfortunately, women, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans are vastly underrepresented in the pool of candidates, making them unable to take advantage of the opportunity to access the best paying jobs in the country. And there are quite a few reasons for the lack of computer science education. Sometimes just it's not a priority or there may not be funding. Some teachers feel that there's not enough training for pre-service and in-service teachers to feel confident doing it. And then many people speak about the demands of teaching the Common Core, and there just simply is a time at the end of the day. But there are really important reasons why we should be teaching coding. And this is important for kids, even if they don't choose to go on and become a computer scientist. It prepares them to understand the world in which we live, and learning to code helps students with critical thinking, logic, math, and computational skills. And Dan Crow says this about computational thinking. He says, computational thinking teaches you how to tackle large problems by breaking them down into a sequence of smaller, more manageable problems. But libraries can help bridge this gap. And there are many ways that you can offer coding experiences at your library. Two of the websites that I have been relying on a lot are Code Academy and Code.org. Ed Surge is also an important site to go investigate. There are many educational toys and games and different kinds of products that can be accessed either through the web for free or with little or no money. And I have a handout that I'll share at the end as many of these listed. I like the Code Academy ones. They have a lot of like the hour of code. All you got to do is spend an hour of time to learn something. So it's like what he was just describing, broken up into little pieces. And I actually did a few years ago, I committed to learning one little thing there to go through a program. I'll talk about that later too, because hour of code is a great way to start. It's like a manageable amount of commitment and time and knowledge that's required of the librarian or staff member who's offering it. So it's an excellent thing. Less scary than some of them. Exactly. Learning programming can just, if you know programmers or see what they talk about, it can just like freeze up your brain. Like, no, no, can't even wrap my head around what they're doing. But this is just small little things. You learn a little bit and you just become less scared of it. Exactly. And it's so much fun I think. With dedicated funding with this $10,000, what we decided to do was purchase 12 Chromebooks in a charging cabinet. And then we hired several people that are prominent in the Omaha area. Shauna Dorsey, who is the co-founder of Interface Web School, one of the two coding schools in Omaha. And then Dr. Victor Winter, who is a computer science professor from UNO. And I was an academic librarian at UNO for nine years and Dr. Winter was one of my colleagues on many committees and so forth. So when I found out that we had this opportunity to get involved in coding, he was the first person that I contacted. And I think that's going to be a message that I try to embed throughout this presentation is really take advantage of the tech people in your community because they're a goldmine of other people who want to help with these kinds of initiatives. So once we found Shauna and Victor, we were sort of moving. That really sort of got us going in the right direction. And another thing that we're doing right now also in the system is purchasing games and kits that we can circulate throughout the 12 branches at OPL. And like I said, the key to our success was to have experts in the community who can be of support. We consulted with Shauna and Victor about what kind of Chromebook to buy, what kind of testing we needed to do to make sure that we were getting the most mileage out of our spending. And so they were great at kind of directing us to some, obviously Chromebooks are much less expensive than laptops and we found that they worked just fine and we were able to make a good investment and still have some money left to do some other sorts of programming with our $10,000. And it was also really important at the Abraham's branch. What I did was just simply talk to families and kids about coding all the time. In fact, the coding initiatives that we were involved in at Abraham's, we never promoted on our calendar because we knew that the demand would be so great that we would have a waiting list probably a year long. And so we kind of were just, as we were testing it, we just kind of got the word out through word of mouth with all of our patrons. We invited a lot of experts to come talk at our branch and talk about the value of coding. We hosted some programs for adults, including area teachers, so that they could understand what their children and students would be doing. And what we started with, we had several multi-session classes with Shauna Dorsey and anywhere from four week to two week, two to four hours on the Sunday afternoon and the kids were learning the basics of primarily HTML. They also learned JQuery, CSS and something else, and now it's escaping me. But those were the main things that the kids were working on. We also had a lock-in one night and had a four hour coding lock-in and the kids worked on HTML. And just recently, this past year, we launched our first Girls Who Code Club in Omaha. It was the first Girls Who Code Club in the entire city of Omaha and only the second one in Nebraska, Lincoln beat us by a couple of weeks to it, but we launched a Girls Who Code Club so I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about that. And here are some pictures of some of the classes with the kids that Shauna Dorsey taught and you can see how there are some really tiny ones in there. There's a six-year-old, one of the kids at the front with the curly hair is just six years old. And one of the things that I loved that Shauna did is they also had to do presentation. So they had to research what HTML was, what CSS was, what JQuery was, and then they had to present it to the class. So kids are really learning a lot when they're getting involved in code. Here's another class. This was an all-girl class, the first one that we offered. And the adorable little girl with the berets was also just six years old. And as long as they can sort of maneuver the keypad or a mouse, they can do it. Now I wanted to kind of highlight for a moment some of the work that Dr. Victor Winter has been involved in and this has been developing over the last several years and it's program called Brick Layer. And Dr. Victor Winter also teaches, he has young children, they're about seven and 10, and he's been running a kids coding club out of his home for several years now. And what he has developed is very, it's really fascinating. It is... Oops. Should I right-click? We'll see if it... Yeah, go ahead and say yes and go to it anyway. Here we go. So this is a 19-module class that is based on Lego. And... Oh, Minecraft, yes. And so the kids go in and work. They actually begin with building Lego models, literally building Lego models, and then they go in and start coding what they built. So, and then they usually have some sort of an exhibit that also accompanies the final product. So they're really dealing with the full steam kind of initiative, so including the visual arts as well as science, technology, engineering, and math. And this is something that he has made available on the web and has been an ongoing project with he and his wife who both run the program. So if you want to investigate the curriculum and a little bit more, feel free to do so. And as I said, this is a 19-module program and kids love it. The whole Lego component, I think, is very engaging and captivating and they can sort of see a visual, physical, tangible thing and then move it into a digital world. So we're really connecting, going from steam rather than stem. I don't know if anyone, you can explain the difference between those. I like that they're going towards, some groups and programs are going towards the steam. Exactly. And if you're not familiar, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. And more recently they've added the A to include arts. So sort of including the visual aspect of these experiences. So a lot of those more science-based things are really artwork or can be, they're creative, they're being creative as well. Exactly. And some people said, that's art, why can't we just say it? And I said, well, it's steam now. Exactly, I love that too. And the folks that live here in Nebraska may be familiar with Do Space, which is a new technology library in Omaha. And they're going to, they've been working with Victor. And they're, at the Do Space there are 3D printers. And so one of the ideas was that the kids could also literally build the print in a 3D, that they could actually create in the Brick Layer program. So it's an interesting development that we're able to take part of. I like making that connection in the computer to the actual hands-on thing. Exactly. And it was great with the 3D printing now. When it first came out, very expensive. But 3D printers are getting more, they're still hundreds of dollars, but a lot more cost effective. They're a lot cheaper now. Exactly. And they used to be so many other places may be able to get into that themselves as well and just a few hundred dollars or something from a grant or a donation to get a 3D printer into your library to be able to do something like that. It's on the screen to an actual, this is what I made. Yeah. There's something about that whole full circle of like having it in your mind and then manifesting into something 2D and a 3D and then to the digital world. It's pretty fascinating. And this is an example of the kind of artifact that the kids might build in Brick Layer. And now I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talk about our first Girls Who Code Club chapter in Omaha. And again, Shauna, who's been my cohort throughout this entire two and a half years, she and I met with two other coding women, Sandy Barr, who is the founder of the Omaha Coding Women, and then Lana Yeager, who's the computer science teacher at South High School in Omaha. We all met and got together and applied for a Girls Who Code Club. Some of the requirements for that include having a stable technological infrastructure, sufficient volunteers and teachers, and a site host. So this past February, we held information sessions to recruit girls, and they were between sixth and twelfth grade who could participate in this chapter of Girls Who Code. It's a very competitive process. The girls had to write three essays that were judged by a team of people, and then they were required to partake in a group interview. And the group interview involved actually solving a coding problem together. And so they spent about three hours with other girls in the group. And so they were sort of judged also on how well they worked as a team and how well they communicated with one another and that sort of thing. We launched a 20-week, two-hour per week session of Girls Who Code this past March. It just ended at the end of July. And we had 12 sixth to ninth grade girls in one group, and then 12 tenth through 12th grade girls. And Girls Who Code requires 40 contact hours per session in order to graduate. And this was a second Girls Who Code club in Nebraska, as I mentioned. Lincoln beat us just by a couple of weeks. And there are many advantages to setting up a Girls Who Code club. And they include the curriculum, which is provided, and all the kinks are sort of worked out. We also had great support from the New York City office. If you're not familiar, Girls Who Code is a national organization. So you apply to have a code club chapter in your community. And there are also a lot of Girls Who Code community resources that we could tap into. That's great. I'm sure a lot of places are thinking, how do I even begin doing this? And you don't have to do it from scratch. Exactly, exactly. And just by finding Shauna and Sandy and Lana, it kind of came from that. It's just a very organic, easy process to fill out. The application wasn't completely onerous. We did it probably in about an hour and a half. And we just waited for a while. It took about six weeks for us to get to find out if our application had been accepted. And then after Christmas, we moved forward and offered these information sessions and then launched our club in March. These are a couple of our girls. These are both sixth graders. And the little girl on the right, she's actually using one of our Chromebooks that is Wi-Fi enabled. So she could check that out and take it home with her and have Wi-Fi, even though she didn't have Wi-Fi in her home. And this is the girls at work. This is the young group. These are the sixth through eighth grade. These are the older girls. And one thing I loved about watching the girls who code is every beginning session, they would sit in a circle and talk about whatever issues they were dealing with that week when it came to coding and a problem that they couldn't solve. And what they started to realize was that coding is all about failure. But it's all about learning from failure and not giving up and being stubborn and persistent. And they also learned from all of the computer programmers who were teachers that that's exactly what they experience every single day too in their own life. And so there were a lot of life lessons about just being engaged and not giving up and being resilient and dealing with the things that don't go right and the frustrations. They also had lots of opportunities to present to the group. So they did almost every other week there was some sort of group that was doing a presentation. So they were learning to work as a team and to build their presentation skills. Here are the groups working on their final projects. And about the last third of the Girls Who Code sessions were devoted to the girls working on their final projects. And so they came up with whatever their collective final project was. Each final project was a group project. So 12 girls on each team worked on a project. And they literally started building it from the ground up. Here they are doing presentations again and showing a little bit of the code that they were writing. Here's the young group. They also brought in guest speakers about every two or three weeks. So there were women who were actively involved in a coding profession, some sort of computer science profession in the city that would come and meet the girls and talk about their experience. So the girls were gaining a lot of professional experience, just sort of learning about the variety of ways you can apply computer science in the work world. And it really did take a village. When we got started, I was not at all sure how we were going to be able to offer coding without paying exorbitant amounts of money for our speakers. And literally, Shawna sort of sat me down and said, don't worry, I will find people. And there will be people coming out of the woodwork that want to be a part of this. And so we had 17 volunteers who helped with everything. So they helped TA the classes. They helped organize other volunteers, the guest speakers. They provided snacks. They helped plan the graduation party. And we actually spent nothing on the Girls Who Code Club. Not one penny from our library budget. The only initial investment was the Chromebooks. And fortunately, the Girls Who Code, those opportunities are expanding in Omaha. There's going to be a Girls Who Code club starting September 25th at Dew Space. Shawna Dorsey has been working with principals all across Omaha Public School System to get as many Girls Who Code clubs started in as many schools as possible. And then Abraham's, my former branch, is offering their second session starting in September. And that will be a 10-week session for four hours at a time. So it's going to be a little more compacted and longer work time. And what we learned about all the coding activities is you've got to get out in the tech community and start networking. That's really the key to your success. I feel like you have to do this on your own. I mean, I don't know anything about coding beyond participating in an hour of code myself. So this is not my educational background. But you will find support. We had support from local tech businesses. Once people learned about Girls Who Code, women in coding across the city were really eager to participate. We had to actually turn people away. There were so many volunteers. I didn't think it would be possible, but it was true. We had such growing support for Girls Who Code. For many folks, this 10- to 20-week session structure may not work for everyone. So if you want to just try some simple kind of one-and-done coding activities, these links will give you a lot of examples of very simple coding activities that you can take advantage of in your own library setting and offer on a two-hour afterschool or Saturday or Sunday program. That often is the way to get kids initially interested or sometimes it also can be something that families do together, a parent and a child or that kind of thing. Future plans at the Omaha Public Library, one of the things we're really interested in doing is putting the bricklayer program in that 19-module structure course from Victor Winter, putting that into a weekly coding opportunity at Abraham's. We also have wanted to work with UNO computer science students who can help tutor our coding club kids. Oftentimes if there's community engagement opportunities at a university, this is one way that a partnership could be forged. At the branch that I'm at now, we have a lot of at-risk teams at our branch and we're trying to figure out ways to offer those kids some regular coding events. About the branch that I'm at now, the team population primarily is boys. It's probably about 90% boys who come on a regular basis. When I moved to the branch, I thought, I'm going to immediately get a Girls Who Code club set up. The first fall that I'm there, I wanted to have this September launch another Girls Who Code club. I got there and I realized this is a totally different demographic. It's not always a one-size-fits-all. It's important to just learn your community and figure out what's going to work best. Through Shauna Dorsey, and again, that whole networking thing is so important, I asked her if she knew anyone in the community that might help us working with at-risk boys. There's a young man, a gentleman who graduated from Interface Web School, one of the coding schools in Omaha, who has been working with at-risk youth in North Omaha. If you're not familiar, North Omaha is a predominantly African-American section of Omaha and unfortunately is plagued by a significant amount of crime and poverty. This individual has been working with a group of at-risk teens all summer long in a program called the Highlander Program. The kids have been doing web development and it's been kind of an astounding project. We've been working with him. Our plan is that we want to do something similar at South and we're going to take our time this fall to lay out what's going to work best and we hope to launch something in January. Like I said, one size doesn't always fit all, so take time to learn your community and see what might work best. That's a good tip for anything you do. Exactly. Just like any other program, you wouldn't just throw something out there because it's a new cool thing. Exactly. You can figure out what does your community need, who's coming in, who's not coming in that might need this and tailor it to them. Exactly. Another way to offer easy and inexpensive ways for coding is there are many games and kits and toys that are out there that don't cost a lot of money. You can also share staff and expertise across your library system or across your geographic region. We have several folks in the Omaha Public Library that are particular keen on technology and introducing that to kids and teens. We had a task force that got together in the last several months and we looked at the ways that we could be offering coding across the system and how we could support one another in our coding initiatives. Sometimes it's a matter of just sort of pooling your resources, the people in your system that are excited about this and eager to offer opportunities and tap into that. Finally, hosting an Hour of Code, as Kristen mentioned earlier, it's such a great way to get kids started. If you haven't participated in Hour of Code, I highly recommend that you do so. I did it and like I said, I know nothing about coding and I was riveted. I didn't want to stop. Going on to the next one and the next one. Yeah, it gets harder and harder and it's very interesting. I would love to see all the Nebraska libraries getting involved in offering an Hour of Code. Coordinate something, yeah. And I wanted to sort of share this little... Whoops. Let's turn the volume up on that, too. What did I just do? Time to escape to get out of that. Here we go. The volume of bits, you can make sure. I can't just see the volume set. That's all I have for you. Oh wait, this is sorry. This is not the one that I want to show. Let me pull the one up from... That's only set up before, yeah. Oops. Ah, I didn't mean to do that. No, it's okay. They spent so much time using the largest education events in history. We are. It's very awesome. Students around the world had an Hour of Code today, part of a global movement to show kids what it takes to create the programs and apps they spent so much time using. The largest education events in history. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. We are. They don't even have to be the computer science engineer. Maybe they want to do something else. But in our world, this isn't going to be the basis for everything that we do. Maybe. So I know. When you're building a program, you have to think outside of the box. If you can change technology, you can change the world. I tell you guys, in every single country, you've done one hour of work. Every district should do. Every district can do it. Please help us get the hour of code to every school, and every classroom, and every child. And I school's doing it. Oh. The escape room. Oh, whoops. There we go. There we go. Next slide. I might want to close that one. It's going to go on to the next video. Oh, whoops. But automatically, 10 seconds. Yeah. There we go. Perfect. Thank you. As you can see, I'm not the most technologically facile. And I provided here to some PDFs that if you're trying to make a case for your library director or to a board or what have you about why you should be offering coding and the value to your community, there's a bibliography here of some important articles that talk about coding being sort of a core literacy and why we should be offering that. And we'll provide these in the show notes afterwards when they're recording this up. You'll have links to these two PDFs so you can get the documents yourself to refer to and use. And then this is from Ed Surge, which was a resource I mentioned earlier. If you're interested in finding out about different kinds of games and products or resources on the web, what have you, all different kinds of things dealing with coding, you'll see, I think this is 17 pages long. So lots and lots of things that you can investigate that are either free or a relatively modest cost that you can introduce at your own library setting. And that is all I have. All right. Great. Anybody have any questions? Take them in using your questions section of your GoToWebinar interface or if you have a microphone, just say, I have a microphone, please unmute me. You can ask your question that way. We did have one comment. When we were talking about the steam versus stem, someone did say, George Lucas says that arts comes first, the idea comes first and then technology is developed to create the art. Oh, excellent. So he's saying it's actually the opposite. She says, not exact words, but that's the gist of what he has said. So using the, get your creative people who wouldn't maybe think about that coding or computers or something is something I'd work, I would use, and they will get in here and like that video, get excited about, look what I made. It's so pretty. Exactly. It wasn't. This is technology. It's pretty. I made it. Oh my God. Exactly. I created this myself. That was great. Yeah. The programs and things that are going on with this I think are just great. I wish they'd be more, yeah, getting more of the kids involved and obviously the girls who are having, you know, there's less of us in the field, which is not, you need to get up there, get more in there. All right. We do have a question that came up. After the girls graduate, I assume from the girls who code, can they still be involved? Are there continued activities for them to advance even more, like once they get beyond the girls who code? Yes. That's an excellent question. Yes. They can participate until they graduate from high school. So say a girl starts in sixth grade. She can continue on and because there are different levels that you can move through at your own pace, even through, say, through our 20-week session. Some girls got to a certain, say they got to level two, but there might have been some girls that got to level four. So they can keep going. And then often those girls who have gone through one session can then be sort of student ambassadors for the following sessions. And so they help each other and start helping. They can mentor the younger kids coming in for the first time, yeah. And so there are many girls, many of the girls that we worked with are continuing on in this next iteration of it. And this is something that if they start with a girls who code club or whatever the coding events you have at the library, and then they could move on to the programs, the schools in Omaha, the web school and everything, and the women who code or Q&O. Exactly. And that would be something to move them on to as well. You know, you've started out with this smaller younger group here in the library, but now you've got this other place that you can move on to in advance. And all of the people that served as volunteers are coding women in Omaha. And so they have the girls in the Girls Who Code Club have these mentors now in the city that they can touch base with and ask questions of and learn more about the specific ways that women are coding. Because it's, I think the women are making a real difference in the kinds of things they code. Like I know when I had a conversation with Lanna Yeager, who's the Omaha South computer science teacher, she has, she got permission to teach an all girl computer science class in her high school, which is sometimes difficult to get that kind of permission when you're excluding another group of kids. But the girl, one of the girls designed an app that addressed domestic violence and if you were in an unhealthy relationship. And I think that's just fascinating that that that would be the topic that I mean, it's an unfortunate topic, but it's a relevant topic for young girls. And I don't know if that would have been something that would have ever crossed the mind of a young boy, you know, a high school boy. So when we have the opportunity, when women have an opportunity to build apps and make technological breakthroughs in the kinds of things that they're coding, that can change the whole complexion of what you see out in the world. It isn't so sort of male dominated in the perspective. So I think that's important. Yeah. Absolutely. Now when, well, in here comes the question, is there a similar group for boys? You know, there is something like that would be specific for them as a group. You know, that's one thing that when I got to South, I'm like, what am I going to do with these boys who need sort of to direct their energy into something productive and positive? There isn't something specific nationwide, I think, because I think there's an assumption that it is so male dominated that the boys are going to be feeling, they'll feel more comfortable in their own high schools if they're offering computer science. I mean, I can investigate that. I'm not positive that there's not something out there. But I know Girls Who Code was established to address the gender gap. That there was a lacking in that area, yeah. Or because the profession itself is historically male dominated, they are more comfortable going into that field than the girls are. So that's why they need the extra help. But I can get, I can understand the question is that you created this Girls Who Code and you've gone the opposite direction where you've now excluded the boys from something. So they now suddenly may feel left out. You know, it's funny. But you can have, I mean, you could have too. You could have, you could just do a boys one and so here's the boys do it and do a mixture and then let the kids decide, you know, which group they want to become a part of and participate in. You know, do some that are not specific for a specific group. I mean, the Hour of Code and a lot of these other ones are not that kind of a thing. They're for anybody. Exactly. You know, it's funny because sometimes, and this is just anecdotal, but in my teen room, when I go in and ask the kids, the boys primarily because there are about mostly 90% boys that hang out at our library, I ask them if they'll, if they'd be interested in doing any kind of coding workshops. And there's a little bit of bravado like, oh yeah, I know that already. I'm already an expert, you know, and they're 14 years old. And it's like, well, and I think that sometimes that's what my friend, Lana Yeager, deals with when she's at her Omaha South High School in her classes, that sometimes the girls are open and curious and not overly confident, but they grow in their level of confidence, but sometimes the boys think they know more than they actually do. I think because they're consumers of games and they spend a lot of time on digital devices that they think their own level of... They don't need to learn. Exactly. They don't need to understand these programs or classes or... So there's a little of that that you have to overcome, kind of that I've kind of experienced already in just the short time I've been at South. But what we're hoping to do in terms of addressing the boys that are kind of at risk, we're going to see if we can find a donor. That's a whole nother, a whole nother issue there. Yeah, we want to see if we can find a donor who might be sympathetic to that cause and then sort of create, build some kind of program. And one thing we'd like to do is have kind of something similar to Girls Who Code, where we provide a meal at each session and have role models in the community, people of color who are involved in coding and all different kinds of... To give the kids sort of a perspective that there are some opportunities for them that when they pursue this and stick to it that there are ways that they can really grow. Yeah, and keep going with it, absolutely. Any other questions, take them in. We still got about five minutes left. If you want to ask anything else or get more information, or if you've done something related to this, as you said, Lincoln already had the Girls Who Code here first, or anything you've done at your library, share with what you've done. Yeah, I'd love to hear. If you just have some comments, congratulations on your wonderful programs. And then someone else said, thank you. This is so helpful. We have been wanting to find out more about how to start a program like this, but it seemed like a daunting task. Now I think we'll begin to explore it because of learning about these things. Thanks so much for the info, yeah. Great, thank you. And then I just wanted to comment, too. I've been saving a lot of the links and things that Marvel mentioned throughout the show into our delicious account. So you didn't have to worry about screwing those down. Those of you that tend to show regularly know this would be available. So the different websites you've mentioned. Now all those things, the PDFs, I'm not going to save those. We'll just give you those PDFs as part of the show information afterwards. But a lot of these pages and websites and groups are out there. And as I was looking at the Hour of Code video, getting that, and it did talk about something coming up. We would love to get everyone together. Specifically, the event we're talking about is actually this December. They've done it every year for a few years now. Every December. Every December. So if you're looking to actually participate in something, that's a worldwide event that everyone, other groups that they'll be doing at the same time. It says in the description of that video, which you might not have seen when we were just showing the full-screen video there. They're specifically being organized for the week of December 5th through 11th, this December 2016. And it's part of the Computer Science Education Week, which I gave a link to that as well I added. So that would be something potentially to work towards maybe your first foray into this, is that this is a specific event coming up this December and you could start getting organized to participate in it right now. And if you're not familiar with Hour of Code, it's essentially sort of a drag and drop environment that you're in. And so the coding is sort of embedded in the drag and drop. And so it's a really interesting and fun way to get involved. And it took me longer than an hour to get through everything. I have to admit I wasn't as quick as some of the young people, but it is a really engaging and fun activity. One last thing I forgot to mention. If you've gotten the latest American Libraries Magazine, there's an article about coding that I would recommend that you go to. And they actually mentioned a site called Connectory.org. I tried to load that. And actually my library system blocked it, so I couldn't provide the link. But Connectory.org is also one of those sites that they mentioned. So I'm not familiar with it myself, but I wanted to put that out there. If you see that article in the most recent American Libraries, they'll mention that site. Yeah, I'll have to look for that. Because I just kind of Googled it. And I got a, this domain is available, but I may not be spelling it correctly. You'll have to see. Yeah, look in American Libraries, see what they send you, too. Do you have another question here? Which is, this is an off topic, but not really. We talked about STEM and STEAM. But apparently now, and I actually Googled myself. It's been a couple of years. There's now Stream. We're adding the R for reading. For the same reason that the A was added for R. It's basically spending everything. And is this a trend or just a regional thing? Well, I just did a Google search for STEM, Stream, and found some articles. Actually back in 2014, from Huffington Post, International Innovation, EdWeb talking about, is that something new that needs to be done? And then someone else saying, forget the acronyms and just teach the stuff. Don't worry about what the acronym is. Just teach all the things. Basically, it is nice, though, to get the focus originally on the STEM, that that was something, all of those scientifically related things, that was maybe not getting enough of a focus. Or people wanted to say, try this. Focus on these things. So I guess it is a new thing. Have you heard anything about it? I haven't heard about that. But thank you for I love learning something new. So this is something I'll investigate, and I can add to my article bibliography. This article talks about that in 2006 was when the term STEAM, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math came out. And then adding A and R for reading. I think a lot of the concept, I guess, I'm just scanning this, what I've found here, is the idea that when you're focusing on other things, it makes people potentially think that other areas are not as important anymore. And the idea is that the reading is still an important skill as well. So I don't know if that'll be. I have not heard about, oh, it's right. She says, I found that grant funders often appreciate acronyms, though it does, can make it seem it's an official thing that exists. It's not just that this library organization has made up some idea of what they want to do, that it's an actual, yeah. Whatever gets you the support that you need, I'm all right. Oh, and here's a quote. Someone says, STEAM, Science and Technology, interpreted through engineering and the arts, conveyed through reading and writing, all based in elements of mathematics. That's some sort of thing that is connected in here. But it is, yeah, a more recent development in that area. Interesting. Definitely something to look into. Oh, and then I'll put a link to that article, yes, into the show notes. Yeah, it's one that I just happened to find, yeah. And this is an article that was on Huffington Post by a principal at an elementary school. So, where was he, does it say? Oh, no, elementary principal, author, national presenter is just a little quicky blurb. Rob Furman, I don't know. He's got a link to his Twitter account here. Let's see. I don't know. I wonder if he was from Arkansas. Oh, right, because they're ahead of the, where's the, who are you? He does a lot of speaking and stuff on this topic, so I get a lot of his information seems to be more, I talk about these things, oh, Pittsburgh, sorry, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, there it is, right in his Twitter account. Excellent. So he's out of Pennsylvania, but he's available to talk, but anyway, so he does this as a thing, it's not just some random person to put up an opinion piece, it looks like he's actually involved in researching these kinds of things, so. All right, email to have any other questions. Let me see here. Rosella, you had your hand up, did you wanna say something? I have unmuted you if you have a microphone? I'm not sure if that's why you had your hand up. No problem, I wasn't sure. All right, or a little after 11 o'clock, so I think it's about time to wrap it up for our hour here this morning. Thank you very much, Marvel, this was great. Thank you for having me. Yeah, as I said, we've had various shows on Encompass Live about all these different new technology things coming out, Jim, maker spaces, maker camps, 3D printing, robotics, whatever, and there's just so many different ways to come at it and I'm glad we haven't done, I've heard about the Girls of Code Club for a while, so I'm glad we finally had, that you were able to come on and tell us more about it from that point of view and helping people get ideas about how to run, get these going in your libraries. So thank you very much and thank you very much everyone for attending out there. The show is being recorded at the moment and it will be available on our website, most likely later this afternoon, as long as, I mean, I'm pretty quick getting things processed up there. I'm at the mercy of YouTube and how long it takes them to get things processed through their system, but later this afternoon it should be available. I'll send you all an email when it is ready to be viewed and let's see, I'll close that off. And it will be available on our website, which I'll show you right now, this is a library commission's website, but if you also just type in Encompass Live, so far in the world we are the only thing that's called that, so when you Google it, you find us. So this is Encompass Live website, our upcoming shows, but right here underneath the upcoming shows is a list to our archives and that's where this one will be posted here's last week's, which is about maker camps, there you go, of like the recording on our YouTube channel, Marvel's PowerPoint presentation and the PDS will be in there in our slide share account, any links I grabbed will be on our delicious account here, so you have all that collected into one space where you can watch it later, share with anyone else you might think may be interested in the topic. So that'll be later today, hopefully you'll join us for one of our other shows we have coming up, and next week our topic is the story of trading stories on Native American Film Festival. This is an event that's been done out in Western Nebraska at Shadron Public Library, this is their third event where they do, well Native American Film Festival kind of self-explanatory there, isn't it? It's a multi-day event, I think it's about, oh it says it, five days, so it's a huge event actually, where the library itself hosts this event with programs and presentations and things, and this year was actually premier of a new documentary, Medicine Woman, which will actually be on PBS later this year, so that was where it was premiered, was at their Film Festival, so Rojelle Attache who's actually watching today's show, hi Rojelle, she will be with us next week remotely to talk about this event that they've been doing for the last couple of years. Let me just see if we have anything here, yeah. All right, I'll just check this out last, oh. Hey, all right, so I hope you join us for that next week's show and any of our other ones we have coming up, we, I'm always adding new topics to the schedule, as you can see I've got the first three weeks of September booked and I'm working on something for the last week, so keep your eyes open when I get it finalized, it'll be up there, and then as the future months as well. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook, so if you are a big Facebook user, we've got a link here, click over there and give us a like. You'll get notifications of when new shows are coming up, when recordings are available, well this is actually logged into some basic, cool. Here you see this morning I did a little reminder to log in right now to this week's show, people can come in on the fly, so if you're big on Facebook, do give us a like over there and we'll keep up with the show that way. There we go. All right, other than that, that wraps it up for this week's session. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you Michael for coming down and joining us this morning and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live, bye bye.