Nothing marks the end of the school year like cooking 600 hot dogs in the summer heat at Emlen Elementary!

Although somewhat outside of PCF’s technology focused mission, we have helped Emlen with this fun event for the last three years. We love doing it and, besides offering assistance to the great staff at Emlen, it is a great way to say goodbye to the students we’ve worked with (and whom are off to middle school elsewhere).

Emlen holds a special place with the Philadelphia Children’s Foundation as they have provided PCF with a ‘sandbox’ to try out new programs and efforts. They were the first school to let us try out the classroom computers, which led the district to revise their used computer donation policy. We taught our first 3D printing classes there before doing so at several other schools, our first library support project, and so forth.

This year, Emlen greatly streamlined the Play Day so that all students were eligible for hot dogs (so we didn’t have to sneak them to ticketless kids). As always, the kids had a lot of fun in no small part thanks to the game and toy donations by Five Below earlier in the year.

It is always nice to to see the kids playing in the large parking lot, but it was equally rewarding to see the outdoor classroom being used for kids to take a break and hide from the sun. About a year ago, PCF assisted the Land Health Institute in creating the area.