Coding is all the rage these days.
But when Unum opened the doors of its downtown Chattanooga office complex Monday to high school students for its seventh annual Tech Night, officials at the insurance giant weren't aiming to attract students who already know how to code, or write the instructions that computers follow.
"That's not who we're targeting," said Michael Weiss, manager of Unum's innovation center. "The goal of Tech Night is to target kids who may have aptitude for an IT job, but not the interest."
As baby boomers retire, the nation will have a shortage of people trained for technology jobs, Weiss said, even accounting for foreigners given visas to work here.
At Monday's event, around 140 students from 15 different area public and private schools, along with home-schooled kids, milled around a large, open space at Unum for a show-and-tell about tech jobs at different booths. Students spoke with employees who do things such as setting up the computers for Unum's employees. Students also toured Unum's data centers.
STEM School Chattanooga student Preston Choyce, left, listens as Unum test engineer Nabin Shrestha explains a business intelligence computer program to him Monday at the annual Tech Night program for high school students.And they got to put technology into action for themselves. Sitting at a laptop, they navigated a two-wheeled Segway-like scooter with an iPad positioned atop it around the room. The iPad showed the faces of students it encountered, and also let the navigator see where the device was headed.
It's meant to let employees at Unum, which has campuses in Worcester, Mass., Columbia, S.C., and Portland, Maine, communicate in a lifelike fashion without actually visiting each other -- taking teleconferencing to the next level by not locking the "face time" in to a designated time or space.
"Travel avoidance," is the idea behind the device, Weiss said.
"Awesome," Walker Valley High School 11th-grader Kalib Snyder said, after taking the device for a spin.
Event organizers also teamed students up randomly to participate in a "marshmallow challenge." They were told to erect a tower made of dry spaghetti, string, masking tape and a paper lunchbag. The team that got the marshmallow the highest off the table was the winner -- though many of the towers were disqualified because they soon toppled.
Noah Pierce, a 10th-grader at STEM School Chattanooga, was on the team that came in second.
"I'm not a fan of coding, but I do enjoy robotics," said Pierce, who enjoyed Tech Night. "The booths were really neat. It's a real good experience to get to do this."
All four of Unum's main campuses hold a tech night, Weiss said. Unum Group's primary businesses are Unum US, Colonial Life and Unum UK, and the company's portfolio includes disability, life, accident and critical illness coverage. The company reported revenues of $10.5 billion in 2014.
Contact staff writer Tim Omarzu at tomarzu@timesfreepress.com, twitter.com/TimOmarzu or 423-757-6651.