Lighthouse Labs is excited to announce our partnership with Kids Code Jeunesse (KCJ) on the Code Create Teach project - a national campaign to support, inspire and encourage teachers to bring code into their classrooms.

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On January 22nd, the Canadian government announced the recipients of CanCode. CanCode is a program supported by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Economic Development that aims to invest $50 million by March 2019 to increase opportunities to learn digital skills. One of the major recipients of these funds were our good friends at Kids Code Jeunesse, together we are going to embark on a journey to bring basic coding to K-12 educators across the country. This project builds on our success in introducing coding to teachers across BC. Over the past two years, we’ve delivered 24 days of workshops to 250 master teachers in six regions of B.C.

What is Code Create Teach? Free of charge one-day introductory workshops on coding and computational thinking for Canadian educators.

Code Create Teach workshops will run from April through December 2018 and will include free, full-day courses for K-12 educators in every province and territory across Canada. These workshops will provide educators with the tools and confidence to teach students the basics of coding. Following the Code Create Teach workshops, each teacher will also receive a free classroom kit of micro:bit - a tiny programmable microcontroller designed to make learning and teaching code easy and fun. Through Code Create Teach we will be supporting over 1500 Canadian educators.

At the heart of great education are great teachers. We need to invest in our educators and inspire them to bring innovation into the classroom. There are many ways to promote digital literacy, but the most sustainable solution is investing in educators. Teachers need the necessary tools to spread digital literacy, as well as the confidence and freedom to inspire their students in their own unique ways. By removing the stumbling blocks, our workshops get teachers excited about code which is the first step in promoting digital literacy.

At Lighthouse Labs we are strong believers that computational thinking and coding are fundamental skills for everyone. You don’t need a computer to learn computational thinking, but learning to code is still one of the best ways to develop it. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to create, explore, and learn through code.

By learning to code, children not only acquire one of the most important and powerful skills of the 21st century, they also establish connections to important concepts behind science, engineering, mathematics, and the arts. The first goal is learning to code. The second is coding to learn.

Check out our brand new Code Create Teach website and keep an eye on the Lighthouse Labs blog for updates on Code Code Teach as we continue this exciting program through 2018!