This week, kids and parents and schools around the country are celebrating Computer Science Education Week with an Hour of Code. Even President Obama got involved, writing a little Javascript. But beyond writing code in school for an hour, what’s a parent to do to keep that excitement going?

Here are some ideas:

• The Khan Academy has some one hour lessons. Try Javascript or HTML/CSS!
• The Python for Kids book is a great introduction for parents and kids alike. Programming books are often written badly, but I think that this one is well done.
• Scratch Programming is all the rage at the elementary school level. Our local school is teaching a class which pretty closely follows this book.
• Carnegie Mellon created the Alice Programming language for kids.

And, if you want to be the coolest mom (or dad) around, show your Minecraft kid how to program mods. First, read up on Minecraft mods on Wired. Next, here are some places to check out:

• Minecraft Mod Youth Online Course
• For the Do-It-Yourself’ers, here’s a github project that might be cool. The kids and I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks well done.

Hopefully that took you beyond the first few hours of coding and you made it fun!

P.S. There’s nothing saying that parents can’t do this … without the kids.