STANDISH – On Monday, Dec. 9, students at the George E. Jack Elementary School participated in the first day of the Hour of Code, a weeklong national program designed to teach young people about the basics of computer science.
In Maine, some 15,000 students at more than 40 schools are participating in the initiative, which is run by Code.org and is being sponsored by numerous tech giants, including Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.
Approximately 600 students in School Administrative District 6 were set to participate in the Hour of Code during the course of the week, with the Edna Libby, H.B. Emery, and Steep Falls elementary schools involved, as well. About 10 million students across the country are participating in the program, which has been endorsed by President Obama.
At Cathy Bunk’s fourth-grade class at the George E. Jack School, 19 students sat in pairs in front of Apple iPads, and programmed a series of commands into an Angry Birds game. Their task was to arrange the commands in the correct order, thereby forcing a bird to navigate around a set of blocks in order to reach a green pig.
“Coding is all about the statements that tell a computer what to do,” said Nicole Gleason, the technology integrator for SAD 6. “They’re just learning the baby steps.”
Bunk said that the program was meant to expose children to the skills likely required for the jobs of the future.
“It’s creating computer scientists, is what the purpose is,” Bunk said. “We want more people in the United States programming. And they want these kids to see how easy it is.”
“Their jobs don’t exist yet,” she added. “Maybe they’ll be programming drones to deliver us packages.”
Two of Bunk’s students, Meaghan Champagne, 9, and Anthony Sineni IV, 9, sat at the front of the class, tinkering with the Angry Birds program. Sineni has an iPhone and a personal computer at home, while Champagne has a mini-laptop. Although both students said they like computers – Champagne longs for her own iPad – they weren’t sure if they wanted to spend their adulthood sitting in front of them.
“I think it would be cool to have this as a job, but I kind of wouldn’t want to be on a computer all day, and that’s all I did,” Champagne said. “I would want to do something else.”
Both students said they would prefer to spend their time either outside or primarily interacting with people. Sineni wants to be a football player, while Champagne said she would like to be either a teacher or a professional soccer player.
“I’m sort of interested in it. I just wouldn’t want to do it for my whole life,” Champagne said, referring to coding.
Due to a snowstorm Monday afternoon that sent students home early, 15 students from SAD 6 schools, ranging from kindergartners to sixth graders, gathered at Gleason’s home, where they logged into pre-arranged national video chats with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, that were organized by Code.org.
Delaney Hesler, a fourth-grade student at George E. Jack was invited to ask Dorsey a question.
“Did you ever think, when you created Twitter, it would be used by second-graders at school?” Hesler asked.
“That’s a great question,” Dorsey said. “When we created it, we weren’t really thinking about who would use it. We were thinking about how we would use it, and I think that’s the most important thing to do when you’re starting anything. How are you going to use it? Because, if you’re building it for yourself, then you’ll have passion to keep building it and to do all the hard things that you need to do to get it out into the world and to see it through.”
Meaghan Champagne and Anthony Sineni IV learn the basics of coding in Cathie Bunk’s fourth-grade class at the George E. Jack Elementary School in Standish. The exercise was part of the Hour of Code, a computer literacy program organized by technology magnates and companies. Send questions/comments to the editors.
