Looking for something to do over Christmas with the kids? How about programming a robot? Or building a marble maze? Something that’s both fun and educational?
The Tumbler Ridge Library has a series of new kits available to the public that teach both computer coding and Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) skills that parents and/or children can work on to have fun, and to learn the basics of coding.
Children’s Librarian Chris Norbury says he attended a library conference a few years ago, where they discussed Maker Spaces, and he saw a presentation by the team at the Smithers Public Library about what they were doing. “They were having good success with the program,” says Norbury. “Rather than reinvent the wheel, I wanted to learn from their successes and emulate it, aka copying or whatever. Whatever you want to say. Okay, I wanted to steal it.”
He laughs. “Well, not really steal. Libraries are pretty friendly about sharing. And you know, I just sort of took their lead. I asked them what people were doing? And they said in their library, they’ve had successes with families working together on these. So they had created these learning activities that parents could take home on the weekend with their children.”
So from that core idea, Norbury set out to research what is popular in the robotics technology world, to find things that local families might be interested in. “I asked myself what would I be interested in doing with my daughter? And I went to a bunch of different homeschooling websites and library websites and find out what’s successful for the user, because we always need to focus on the user side of things.”
From that research, he came up with a bunch of different items that were both educational and would be appropriate and of interest to a variety of age ranges. “One of the things I wanted to do was to advance coding, because I know the schools are focusing on coding. And I think like it’s just a direction that society is going in.”
Norbury says these new activities would not have been possible without a grant from Canada Post for $2540.37
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
