At the East Brunswick Public Library I had the privilege of working with a very talented and supportive IT staff as well as in a community that is always interested in the cutting edge of technology.  Through my relationships with teachers and students at the high school as well as my IT staff, I was able to put on very successful technology based programs for teens in the community.

League of Legends Gaming Tournaments:

I have worked with my staff and the teens to provide well-rounded gaming options at the library. At the request of a group of teens, I began running gaming tournaments with the popular computer game, League of Legends. Our tournaments took place after the library closed and the teens had access to all the computers at the library.  By partnering with Riot Games, we are able to provide prizes for our tournaments without any cost to the library, enabling us to throw a pizza party at each tournament.  Each time we hosted the program we add new features like shoutcasting (live commentating by a teen in the television studio), and broadcasting the tournament over live television or Twitch.tv to those outside of the library.  This program often drew over 60 teens to the library each time it is offered.  We gained attention for these tournaments from the gaming community as well as other libraries.  Check our my publications page for articles that have been written about our events.

Hour of Code – Coding at Your Library:

In 2014 I worked with the Code Club at the East Brunswick High School to bring teens in for an evening of coding at the library.  We used the annual Hour of Code anniversary to jump start our program.  Hour of Code is a global movement seeking to reach millions of students and start them on the path to coding.  For our event, we brought in two guest speakers in the field of computer programming and software engineering, showcased coding through Arduino, and utilized several of the programs featured on code.org to spark our teens’ interest.  The reason this program was so successful had a lot to do with the buy in from the Code Club’s teacher as well as the teens in the club.  They worked hard to plan the event and the club volunteered to staff the event and show their fellow students their coding knowledge.  With the support of the Code Club and the high school we have been able to host this popular program every December.

Girls Can Code – Summer Coding Workshop

In the summer of 2015 I was approached by two young women who wanted to run a coding workshop at the library just for girls.  We know that women are too often left behind and excluded from the computer science fields and jobs.  I was happy to host a program that encourages teen girls to get excited about coding.  For a week in the summer 12 girls attended the workshop and learned HTML and CSS and built their own websites. This program was empowering not only for the girls who attended it but for the teens who created and ran such a successful event.

Because of how popular this program turned out to be, I’ve run a different coding workshop (or two!) every summer.  One summer we had the teens of TLC teach coding through music with EarSketch, another year I hired two teen girls (they have their own LLC!) to teach two different workshops on Python and digital animation.