Helen Wang had reached the end of her rope.
Wang, the mother of a Cherry Crest student and a Bellevue Academy student, quickly grew frustrated while trying to find summer programs for her children. The process usually entails searching through hundreds of web pages to find the right enrichment program for each child, she said.
Together with her husband, two developers and two part-time marketing employees, Wang created 6crickets, a website that helps parents discover and schedule summer and, more recently, after-school programs for their children.
“That’s the beauty of technology– it can really help parents,” said Wang.
Since going live in March with summer camp offerings, the website has had more than 10,800 unique visitors, formed partnerships with 50 providers and logged more than 3400 camps in their online system.
The summer camps were open across Bellevue, Seattle, Lynnwood, Shorewood, Redmond, Mercer Island and other areas.
With the initial success of the summer offerings, Wang began working on creating a system in which parents can vote for the in-school and outside of school extracurricular activities hosted by their school. She is still in discussion with schools to implement this system.
“This is something schools can use to leverage the collective wisdom of parents,” she said. “There are schools that were involving parents in the process, but so far, it’s been in an ad hoc manner. This is just more information for the people who make the decisions.”
The website will also help parents schedule and book after school activities, a process which Wang said can sometimes be more challenging than finding the programs. “Even for well-known programs, the problem often isn’t discovery, but scheduling,” she said.
There is no fee for parents or administrators to use the website– the only cost is a small fee levied on program providers when the site helps them fill empty seats in their programs.
Wang has started recording and posting five minute long video interviews with some providers in which she asks them about their background, curriculum and instruction style. The 6crickets team is also currently working on implementing a review system and a system in which parents can nominate programs.
