Hour of Code aims to expose millions of students to programming

“It’s our responsibility as teachers to motivate students who have reached that potential in terms of getting involved with technology”, she said. “It has helped me realize that coding isn’t as impossible as it seems”.

For one hour Wednesday morning, Gov. Butch Otter was just another student in Sonia Galaviz’s fifth-grade classroom learning to code.

APL is an independent K-12 school that provides individualized instruction for students across the autism spectrum alongside their typically developing peers.

With so much talk about state funding for education, Urquidez said the “Hour of Code” is a prime example of a program that would benefit more students if there was enough money to pay for it.

Some tutorials feature characters from Disney’s film Frozen or the Star Wars universe, while others are themed around popular games such as Flappy Bird – which appealed to grade five student Boyd Lucas, 11. Hour of Code believes that every student should have the opportunity to learn computer science.

However, this was not the first time students at the Lower School have been exposed to Coding this year, school representatives said Friday morning.

Students at Smart throughout the day tested their teamwork, creativity and problem-solving skills as they picked up novice computer programming tricks.

Beth Gentrup – who teaches technology, among other classes, at the junior high – has incorporated Hour of Code into her curriculum since the program began.

“The research has proven that the more languages children learn at a young level, the more able they are to use language in any form in the future”, she said.

“It was a great way to engage with students in the community and share with them some of the many ways computer scientists impact society”, Huggins said.

“I want to make something new that could change the world”, she said.

Some of the more advanced projects involve drawing angles and repeating sections of code, and though it’s all done with a visual interface, with one click users can view the more complicated text version of the code.

This year, she’s partnered with Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

Teacher Andrew Goff hosted an Hour of Code in his business and marketing class because coding skills “are very transferable into the skill sets that are more and more in demand in all business and marketing positions”.

Students at Prince Elementary cycled through four one-hour sessions that covered coding, looping and binary numbers.

Dasso said she also pushed for the all-day crash course in computer literacy to help the school’s chances of winning $10,000 to purchase new technology.

Likewise, Rosales said: “Technology has become ambiguous”.