A few glitches plagued classrooms and computers at Cascade View Elementary School Wednesday, Dec. 10. There weren’t enough iPads—and definitely not enough with “Move the Turtle” installed—in Joyce DeLurme’s classroom, not enough bandwidth in the computer lab, and not enough exercises to keep all of the students participating in code.org’s Hour of Code, busy for the aforementioned hour.
“You finished? All of it?”
Mount Si High School teacher Kyle Warren and several of his students asked that a lot on their visit to the school, to help the younger students with Hour of Code activities. What they heard back were variations on “Yeah. It was easy. Now can I do this one?”
It may have been exasperating to the high-school contingent of advanced robotics and computer science students, trying to keep up with the grade-schoolers, but it was also a lot of fun for everyone involved.
Games with code
At the grade-school level, Hour of Code looked a lot more like playing games with monsters, angry birds, and “Frozen” princesses than it did like writing code, but Adham Baioumy, a senior robotics student, says it’s actually both.
“This is just more of a fun way of teaching programming,” he said, between helping second graders in DeLurme’s room. Students learn the general concepts of programming by dragging and dropping the game instructions—walk, jump, flap, etc.—into the right order to win the game, then testing (OK, playing) the programs. “They love playing games… In this one, they’re just trying to get the monster to the candy,” Baioumy said.
Most of them are. A few are giggling at the animated monster, or telling him to hurry. One boy is so intent on finishing that he doesn’t notice when the obstacles in the game change.
“I don’t get these controls,” one boy announces to the room. A second later, he looks at the game course and sees that the monster has to jump bottle caps instead of blocks this time. “Oh, OK!” he says and goes back to work.
Maybe two minutes later, he’s completely done, and asking what to do next. Warren offers him a new game, or a chance to go back and try to improve his score in this game, but the boy shakes his head twice. On to the next challenge.
In the portable computer lab, a fifth grade class was logged in and clicking away before their high school helper, Kevin Pusich arrived. There were lots of challenges for Pusich, too, including broken headphones, and a detour from the first step of his plans for the class.
He asked everyone to bring up a video of President Obama, talking about Hour of Code, but “YouTube is not allowed,” a boy told him. The website is blocked at the elementary school, but not at the high school.
They skipped the video and just started working.
“Did he say they were going to write code?” a substitute teacher in the lab asked. “That is so cool!”
Nationwide, more than 6 million students participated in the Hour of Code last week, to introduce the concepts of programming to all grade levels and promote students abilities and interest in computer science. In Snoqualmie Valley, 52 high school students visited all district schools, plus the Parent Partnership Program, and worked with about 80 teachers.
“In four days, 129 hours of computer science lessons were presented to a whopping 3,008 students!” Warren wrote in a summary of the week’s events.
Learn more at www.code.org.
