Cypress High kids swap textbooks forkeyboardstolearnprogramming
Students in teacher Michael Manning's computer science class complete tutorials and webinars to learn how to create computer programs during the Hour of Coding campaign.
MICHAEL MANNING, COURTESY OF CYPRESS HIGH SCHOOL
Steve Jobs once said, “Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.”
Cypress High School is encouraging students to take Jobs' advice.
The school participated in Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 9-13) and the Hour of Code, which is a first-time effort for students to write computer programming code for one hour each day for a week.
More than 5 million students were scheduled to participate worldwide.
Cypress High School's goal in participating in the Hour of Code is to expose more students to computer programming and dispel some common misconceptions about computer programming, such as “only geniuses can write code,” or “a programmer spends all of his time isolated in a cubicle.”
Computer science is actually a very creative activity and it affects virtually every aspect of our lives.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics anticipates that within the next 10 years there will be a tremendous need for computer programmers.
By participating in the Hour of Code, Cypress High School is helping students understand more about computer science, encouraging more students to consider taking computer science classes and possibly even majoring in computer science or a related field.
In preparation for the Hour of Code and Computer Science Education Week, teachers were asked to voluntarily give up one day of regular instruction so their students could participate in Hour of Code activities.
The response was overwhelming.
Nearly every period of each day this week, teachers swapped students with me so their students could use the computer lab and work on lessons in beginning computer programming.
There were so many requests that computer teacher Jay King helped out by swapping students with other teachers so he, too, could teach an hour of computer coding.
A few other teachers also conducted Hour of Code activities in their classrooms.
By the end of the week, more than 2,000 students at Cypress High School participated in the Hour of Code.
The lessons chosen for the Hour of Code included videos about various programming concepts.
The videos were taught by famous people in technology such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
After each video, the students worked on coding exercises that involved programming things such as Angry Birds or zombies.
– Michael Manning teaches computer science at Cypress High School.