- April 18, 2024
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The 20-or-so second-graders hunched close to their computer screens as the kids, working in pairs, dragged and dropped lines of computer code to make animated figures move across the screen.
“We’re working on the second level of Frozen,” said Jeffrey Powell, 7, referring to the animated Disney movie whose characters appeared in the online coding tutorial. “We’re moving Elsa to go back into her castle.”
The 7- and 8-year-olds, along with the rest of the school, including faculty and staff, were taking part in code.org’s Hour of Code event, an “international campaign” to teach the basics of coding to children through simple online tutorials, according to the website.
The Hour of Code session was the beginning of a week-long foray into coding for the Belle Terre Elementary students, and the opening event of the school’s Computer Science Education Week initiative Dec. 8-12.
“We want our children to grow up in this tech-savvy world and to know how to code and create things on the computer,” second grade teacher Agatha Lee said. “I love the interactive aspect," of the tutorials, she said. “Hearing them use these problem solving skills, I love hearing that. It incorporates all of the subjects.”
Belle Terre teacher Teresa Phillips, who recently won an Education Foundation mini-grant to start a coding program in her classroom, helped schedule the week of events, Lee said. The school is keeping a running total of lines of code written by students during the week.
Parents have been invited to an interactive coding event to take place on the evening of Dec. 9, and the school will hold a day-long coding event Dec. 11 and another Hour of Code event Dec. 12.
