Cedar Ridge Elementary students take part in global Hour of Code

Published 11:32 pm Thursday, December 10, 2015

Yulisa Bautista stared intently at the computer screen in front of her as her fingers typed. The fifth-grader at Cedar Ridge Elementary School was trying to get the animated figure on the screen to move in exactly the way she wanted.

“It isn’t that hard,” she said, even though it was the first time she’d tried something like that.

Bautista was one of about 45 Cedar Ridge students taking part in the Hour of Code on Thursday, a worldwide effort to spark interest in computer science by having children write code for an hour.

“Our ALPHA (gifted) class has been working with code since the start of the year,” said teacher Rayda Reed. “Today, we have a standard fifth-grade class come in, and the ALPHA students are coaching them on using code.”

The students have been using a site called code.org.

“It takes them through code at their own pace. There are videos that introduce them to the concepts, and they learn how to make the characters on screen do what they want them to do,” Reed said. “For Hour of Code, the website has prepared several different tutorials on the very basics of coding, and the ALPHA students are helping the others work through them.”

Reed said the ALPHA students spend about a half hour a week writing code.

“Some weeks we may do an hour, but not much more than that,” she said.

“It teaches them how to think through things and solve problems. Basically, they are given a set of problems — to get the characters to do what they want — and they have to figure out how to do that. It teaches problem solving, perseverance, logical thinking.”

Cristiany Pineda said she’d never done any coding before starting with the ALPHA class this year.

“But it’s something I wanted to do for a long time,” said Pineda, who added that she’d like to work with computers when she grows up.

Reed said the students will have opportunities to continue to learn coding even after they leave the fifth grade.

But some of the students said the half hour to an hour they do each week in class isn’t enough to whet their interest.

Esteban Chavarria Jr. said he codes several days a week at home.

“Everything about it interests me,” said Chavarria, who added that he’d like to design computer games when he grows up. “It isn’t always easy. But I like that. I like solving problems.”

Brett Cole said he codes outside class, too, and that his interest in computers was also sparked by his love for games.

“A lot of people don’t realize that you just can’t play games on a computer automatically. People have to make them, and you have to do code to do that,” he said.