County Update
With Santa Clara County
Supervisor Mike Wasserman
Supervisor Mike Wasserman was elected to the Santa Clara
County Board of Supervisors in November 2010, and re-elected in
2014. He represents District 1, which includes Gilroy, San Martin,
Morgan Hill, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno and portions of San Jose.
(supervisorwasserman.org)
Free Youth
Computer
Coding
Classes
at Morgan
Hill and
Gilroy
Libraries
Y
outh Coding Classes are now
being offered at all Santa Clara
County Library District libraries,
free of charge! As the Chair of the Santa
Clara County Library District, I wanted
to make computer coding classes more
accessible to kids, especially to our
under-served youth. Computer coding,
a system of signals representing letters
or numbers which are then transmitted
electronically to a computer to complete
a task, is becoming increasingly important
in today’s electronic world as well as the
skills and knowledge needed to write and
create these codes.
The new, robust offering of coding
classes and events include Hour of Code,
CodeF1rst, Girls Who Code, Introduction
to Arduinos, Teen Hackathon/CU Hacks,
Middle School Intro to Programming
using Javascript, Miss CEO, Steam
Robotics Classes, Java Coding Class,
CoderDojo Coding Club and more.
An educated workforce serves every-
one’s interests: better paying jobs when
kids finish school and more local hiring.
The earlier that a girl or boy can learn to
code, the more ingrained these skills will
be. We wouldn’t expect future doctors to
take their first biology classes in college;
why should tech workers wait to learn
these fundamental skills until much later
in their studies? They shouldn’t!
It is vitally important for our cur-
rent and future local workforce have
these fundamental skills. According to
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
the founders of Hour of Code, comput-
ing jobs are the #1 source of new wages
in the United States. And while there
are currently 523,222 open computing
jobs nationwide, only 42,969 computer
science students graduated into the work-
force last year. It’s time to change that.
And free library coding classes for kids
are a good start.
Visit the Library District website for
more information: sccl.org.
gmhtoday.com
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