Want to learn coding? Here's where in the Five Towns

Peninsula Public Library is teaching children a unique skill set and there is still time to get in on it. Children’s Librarian Pat Murphy made the “natural transition” to leading coding programs after many series of science projects.

“There’s a little bit of math involved it takes a little bit of understanding, just placing and sequencing and that sort of thing,” Murphy said about the coding programs which the library has been running since last year.

Before coding, Murphy led other STEAM or Science, Technology, Engineering Art and Science programs, including making crystals and building catapults.

“We did a lot of the typical science projects kids do in school and then I was reading more and more about coding and it was just time to get started on that,” she said.

To start, Murphy brought on the Girls Who Code program, run by a national organization, aimed at giving young women the ability to seek careers in male dominated industries.

Currently, 26 percent of computing jobs are held by women, Tarika Barrett, CEO of Girls Who Code wrote in an email.

“By providing underrepresented students with access to computer science education and career readiness resources, we’re giving them opportunities to seek our the careers of the future, often bettering their lives in the process,” Barrett wrote.

Girls Who Code has become a part of libraries nationwide as an attempt to reach as many girls and non-binary students as possible, according to Barrett. The group is partnered with library networks like EveryLibrary Institute and the American Association of School Librarians.

“We know firsthand that libraries play an integral role within communities- serving not only as resource hubs but also as important convening spaces for community members to learn, grow and thrive together,” Barrett wrote.

Recently, Murphy added a boy’s section of the coding program through the Scratch Foundation, an organization developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which the library also used in their initial coding training before teaching students this skill.

Elaine Atherton, head of programs at the foundation said that this is a digital platform developed to teach.

“It’s a tool for creativity that happens to use coding for learning,” Atherton said.

Scratch was developed with the values of ‘project, passion, peers and play.’

The library work environment creates a space for students to combine these values Atherton said.

“Most of the time they’re making project with peers, so that’s where I think libraries are an integral part,” Atherton said.

The boys and girls coding sections at Peninsula Public Library are open to third grade to fifth grade girls and classes had anywhere from six to eight children in each program.

Murphy holds one session of coding programs per month, for boys and girls. The next girls coding program will meet on Jan. 24 and the next boys coding program on Jan. 31.

Questions? Contact the Children’s Room at Peninsula Public Library, 280 Central Ave., Lawrence, at (516) 239-3262.