The week of Dec. 7, HHS participated in the Hour of Code. Coinciding with Computer Science Education week, students used class time to create such interesting pieces of art including snowflakes from Frozen to Star Wars game simulations. With help via tutorials, the students created codes in an hour or less (depending on whether they did it in one sitting).

“The students seemed to enjoy the activities and gained a greater awareness of the technology,” special education teacher Maria Padilla Davis said.

This is not the first time the school has participated in Hour of Code. The school previously participated in the program last year when Computer teacher Natasha Gaujeanlamar suggested the idea to the director of Technology here at HHS.

“I learned about this initiative from being a Computer Teacher at my previous school district (Teaneck Public Schools),” Gaujeanlamar said. “He (Director of Technology Joel Handler) thought it was a great idea.”

The decision to implement it resulted in great success and excitement from the HHS community. Even better news, the program was a bigger hit than last year. Last year, if you printed out your certificate stating completion of the Hour of Code, you could bring it to the Tech Hub to receive a Hillsborough Township Public Schools bag and gain entrance into a raffle to win a free Chromebook cover. Unfortunately, that is not the case this year, but this hasn’t stopped Hour of Code from prevailing.

“The students really got into it,” Guajeanlamar said. “Many more teachers implemented it into their classrooms this year than last year and more students did it for the mere satisfaction of completing the task.”

This brings good news for the Computer Science community as Hour of Code is a program designed to introduce children to coding, i.e., telling a computer what to do. Anyone can code, or at least that’s what code.org says, the organization in charge of running it.

“The goal of the Hour of Code is not to teach anybody to become an expert computer scientist in one hour,” according to code.org. “One hour is only enough to learn that computer science is fun and creative, that it is accessible at all ages, for all students, regardless of background.”

Although it’s not the initial goal to make you a computer expert, the program certainly is not shy about encouraging entry into the field.

According to code.org, “Millions of the participating teachers and students have decided to go beyond one hour – to learn for a whole day or a whole week or longer, and many students have decided to enroll in a whole course (or even a college major) as a result.”

Even though they believe this is exactly what the country needs in order to get more people in the field, it may not be the only thing they have to do.

“I believe that the program must expand to where experts are interacting with the students directly, over a period of several days, to establish a better understanding of the technology,” Davis said.

One thing is for sure and that is it makes kids and educators alike want to be engaged with Computer Science rather than just having to do it because they have to. This results in both students and teachers learning how to code which can help to increase math and science scores as well as hold down a job.

“Coding is the language of the future,” Padilla Davis explained. “Even my first job out of college involved coding, using SGML.”

As you can see, this technology and this program will be around for the foreseeable future. So HHS, it’s time to embrace the future. Let it in and give it a big handshake because computer science may just be your lifelong business partner.