Code Create Teach: A national campaign that will inspire and empower teachers to bring digital skills to classrooms in every Canadian province and territory MONTRÉAL, March 12, 2018 - Kids Code Jeunesse (KCJ), in partnership with Lighthouse Labs, is embarking on Code Create Teach, a national campaign to inspire and encourage teachers to bring code into their classrooms. From April to December 2018, they will be hosting free, full-day crash courses for K-12 educators in every province and territory across Canada. “In a recent survey of 1500 young Canadians and their parents, more than 50 per cent of youth want more opportunities to learn to code but only 1/3 said they have access to that kind of opportunity” (Actua). We need to equip children and teachers with the necessary resources to develop these essential skills. Code Create Teach will offer 26 workshops that will provide Canadian educators with the tools and confidence to inspire students to tinker, play and experiment with technology - to become makers, rather than just consumers, of their digital world. This project builds on KCJ’s success in introducing coding to teachers across British Columbia, with Lighthouse Labs, as contracted by the B.C. Ministry of Education. Over the past two years, they’ve delivered 24 days of workshops to 250 master teachers in six regions of B.C. Following these Code Create Teach workshops, each teacher will receive a free classroom kit of micro:bits, a tiny programmable microcontroller designed to make learning and teaching code easy and fun. Code Create Teach, among other KCJ projects, is funded thanks to a $6 million dollar commitment from federal government’s CanCode program to national non-profit KCJ. Through CanCode funding, 70,000 children and 2000 teachers across the country will have the opportunity to receive training in 21st century digital skills. Follow Kids Code Jeunesse and Lighthouse Labs on Twitter: @kidscoding and @lighthouse_labs Founded in Montreal in 2013, Kids Code Jeunesse is a national and bilingual non-profit leader in digital skills training for teachers. In 2016, British Columbia’s Ministry of Education contracted Lighthouse Labs (LHL) and Kids Code Jeunesse (KCJ) for the provision of a series of 4-day Train-the-Trainer professional development workshops on computational thinking and coding for 120 grade 6-9 teachers in 6 regions of the province. KCJ works with various levels of government to help implement coding into communities, including the Ministry of Education, Quebec. Lighthouse Labs is an immersive, modern approach to teaching web and mobile software development. With a hands-on curriculum built by a community of industry experts, the program focuses on transforming passionate people into agile programmers. Since 2013, they have introduced over 20,000 Canadians to code. “In our workshops in British Columbia and across the country, we have met so many teachers who were willing to meet the challenge of bringing code into the classroom. We have been blown away by their dedication to ensure that their students have the 21st century skills they need. We are very much looking forward to further supporting teachers with Code Create Teach; and continuing to help them build their confidence and communities of practice.” Juliet Waters, Senior Director, Education For further information, please contact: Danny Payne Raison D’Être Media danny@raisondetremedia.ca 1 (514) 621-8657