Hour of Code

December 9-15, 2013 is Computer Science Education week.  The people at code.org started a nation-wide campaign to get as many students as possible to participate in "One Hour of Code".  As I am writing this post, over twelve million people have participated in one hour of code!  This is amazing!  I am excited that my students and I got to be a part of this great event.


I think that many students are intimidated by computer programming.  Others don't know what "code" is.  I have been promoting this event with my students, and with my school, for weeks.  As I was promoting this event I was asked countless times "What is code?".  I think this event has at least brought an awareness to computer science.  Hopefully a lot students were inspired to learn more! We have viewed a few of the promotional videos put out by code.org.  Here is one of the videos that I showed in class today:

Our district-wide Hour of Code event took place at another high school in our district.  I knew that I had a bunch of students that were interested in our event, but were unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts.  So, throughout the day I played this video for my students and introduced them to coding through Google's Blockly Maze.

I briefly showed my students the site and the just asked them to "play" for a few minutes.  They were hooked!  They were competing with each other to solve the mazes.  If they got stuck, they helped each other out.  When it came time to transition to a new activity, students didn't want to stop coding.  I noticed that students were flipping back and forth between our new activity and the Blockly site.  Many students told me that they were going to work on it more tonight.

I ended up taking seven of my students over to our neighboring high school to participate in the Hour of Code after school.  We had close to thirty students attend from our three district high schools.

We started with an "unplugged" activity where students were introduced to the idea of code.  I brought in a bunch of blocks and asked the students to tell me how to build a tower.  Students were introduced to the idea of walking through a process using a set of commands (move your hand left, grab the block, release the block, etc.)

After the "unplugged" activity, students had the opportunity to work with the Blockly maze activity.  Again, students were hooked!

We then transitioned to MIT App Inventor.  We had students follow video tutorials to create an app for an android device.  They loved it!  In a very short amount of time students created a working app for their phones.

Overall the event was a success.  Now we just need to figure out how we can get the excitement about coding to extend beyond this week.