Family Code Night is a free, simple, high-impact event that nearly any elementary school can host to advance computer science education and family engagement. Featured on both the White House website and the front page of the New York Times, Family Code Night is a delightful, whole-school evening event in which children pair up with a parent or guardian to do their first hour of coding, together. The effect is terrific: families love it, school communities are mobilized, and kids and parents emerge eager for more CS learning, both at home and at school. MV GATE is the California non-profit that pioneered the Family Code Night event, using the superb free online curricula and resources of Code.org, MIT’s Scratch, Made With Code, and other sources, conducting the event more than thirty times for thousands of kids and parents. Now MV GATE is working with the White House to enable any elementary school in the country to easily put on this free program. This past spring, MV GATE committed to the White House that we would create an “Event Kit” to help any elementary school in the country hold their own Family Code Night, and were invited to the White House for the spring Science Fair and CS for All program announcements. Now we have taken this commitment a major leap forward. With White House support, we are partnering with SignUp.com to make our “Event in a Kit” a downloadable free resource offered on SignUp’s event management platform to their network of 8 million school parents and volunteers. We are optimistic about the likely results: sponsored Family Code Nights at thousands of schools for hundreds of thousands of kids and parents, especially during this year’s National Computer Science Education Week Dec. 5-11, along with a companion earned media program to engage parents in CS education for their kids. We welcome collaboration with all CS for All Consortium members and computer science learning advocates to bring this delightful free program to elementary schools and families nationwide.
