Park City High School to host first bilingual Community Code Night Dec. 4

Park City High School is hosting its first Community Code Night with instructors from local tech businesses and volunteers leading an interactive workshop to introduce students to the world of computer programming.

The event is free and open to students in grades 7-12 and their families and includes dinner. It’s scheduled Wednesday from 6-7:30 p.m. at the high school. Organizers ask participants to arrive about 15 minutes early with their school-issued or personal computers.

Students and their families will learn how to make a website and about tech careers while interacting with local volunteer computer science professionals, according to a press release.

Portions of the workshop will be conducted in Spanish as well as English, part of an intentional focus to include the district’s Latinx student population.

In 2018, only 10 percent of Utah high schoolers who took the AP Computer Science test identified as Latinx, according to a press release from one of the organizers, Provo-based IT education company Skill Struck.

The Community Code Night is a collaboration among Skill Struck, the Utah STEM Action Center, the Park City School District’s Latinx Educational Affairs team and the Park City Community Foundation’s Social Equity Division.

The goal is to increase accessibility to lucrative jobs in the tech sector for groups that aren’t well represented in the field, including women and ethnic minorities, according to the release.

Utah’s tech sector is the second-fastest growing in the nation, according to the release, with 4,756 open computing jobs, and with an average salary for a computing occupation in the state nearly $86,000. But last year, only 567 Utah students took the AP test for computer science.