Zillow Kids Day of Engineering 2019
Co-Authored by Michael Ruelas, Principal Software Development Engineer, Zillow Group
Zillow’s Seattle office recently hosted its fifth annual Kids Day of Engineering, an event where children aged 5–17 are invited to accompany their parents to work and participate in a day of STEM based learning and fun!
This year our three kids Oliver (five), Madelyn (six), and Chloe (eight), attended the highly anticipated event. They were up early and excited to see where mommy and daddy go to work each day.
Oliver and the other five-year-olds participated in the Unplugged curriculum, which teaches foundational coding principles. They begin by programming a live human robot (the teacher) to make a jelly sandwich, using verbal instructions. The teacher/robot stands at a table with a bag of bread, a jar of jelly, and a spreader. The kids quickly learn that the robot takes its instructions very literally. They’ll say, “put the jelly on the bread!” and the robot takes the whole jar of jelly and sets it atop the bag of bread. Hilarity ensues. Eventually they learn how important it is in coding to break it down into small steps and get the instructions in the right order.
Other Unplugged activities include navigating a hopscotch maze, playing the programming board game Robot Turtles, and making a computer out of paper, a file folder, and color pre-printed sheets. They use scissors to cut out hardware and software components, crayons to color everything and get to bring home their ‘computer’ to show off their creativity and hard work.
Madelyn joined the Junior Coders group to play games like Lightbot and Run Marco/Run Maria that teach basic coding concepts on touchscreen tablets. When they were ready, they moved on to Scratch Junior, a free-form coding app that uses a pictorial drag-and-drop interface, (no reading skills necessary).
Chloe and the Eight & Up Coders created a Veteran’s Day animation and a game or animation of their own design. The class does a show and tell about halfway through so the kids can inspire each other and learn from other projects. Positive reinforcement and encouragement are used to address mistakes and teach debugging as a core coding skill. You can see a sample of the 600 animation projects created by Zillow kids on scratch here.
Our children aren’t ready for Studio Class (ages 14–17), but they’re looking forward to the opportunity to experience what it’s like to work in a game studio in a few years. Teens work together to make something bigger and better than what any of them could do alone. They broke into teams for art, sound, animation, coding, and integration and worked together to create a touchscreen playable game.
Other highlights from the 2019 Kids Day of Engineering include getting to ride the elevator to the tippy top of the Zillow Tower, meeting all of mommy and daddy’s friends, and of course a trip to the famous Zillow Candy Wall!
All three of our kids loved the day and have continued to apply what they learned on Scratch on their iPads at home. For us parents, it’s a big help to have the event on a day when we don’t have child care, yet another reason why Zillow was named One of Fortune’s Best Places to Work for Parents. We’re already looking forward to Kids Day of Engineering 2020!
