PEABODY — The Peabody Institute Library is providing a weekly opportunity for kids to come in and practice their computer coding skills, just in time for its upcoming hackathon with Fiero Code, a coding education organization dedicated to providing programs for schools and libraries.
Senior Teen Librarian Amory Thomas said that she wanted to work with Fiero Code to provide some type of computer-based activity for teens.
“You’d be surprised, a lot of them have zero tech skills, they don’t know the differences between a monitor and a desktop, and so I really want to start something,” Thomas said.
The upcoming hackathon, where participants can create and showcase their own coding projects, will happen sometime in June or July. The weekly coding club, which occurs every Thursday at the 82 Main St. location’s teen room, is a chance for teens to hone in on their coding skills before the event.
“There’s a bunch of different prizes that they can win at the end,” Thomas said. “The big one that I’m telling kids about is that they can win a programmable drone. It’s really cool!”
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Higgins Middle School students and brothers Zachary Comeau, 14, and Lucas, 12, attended and practiced their skills with a program called Scratch, a site specifically designed for new programmers. Zachary said that an exploratory class in school introduced him to coding and that he loved it. Lucas, on the other hand, is interested in developing video games.
Homeschooled student Diana Quinones, 17, said that in her old school in the Dominican Republic, she learned HTML in one of her elective classes.
“I enjoyed it and just saw this as a chance to get back into it,” Quinones said.
She compared how fun it was working with HTML and making websites to when she had to learn Excel, which she said “felt like accounting” and made her feel like “she was in a cubicle.”
“It’s something else, HTML is pretty fun, I just like typing in stuff and seeing it work,” Quinones said. “I could do whatever, I can make a cute, little girly website, or I could make a spooky website, and I just found it really fun.”
Higgins Middle School student Allen Chandler, 12, was there because he likes making games, such as a fishing simulator game he created recently.
“I want to make my own app someday,” Chandler said.
