High Point students, teachers take part in Hour of Code

SUSSEX BOROUGH — More than 700 students at High Point Regional High School, along with 25 teachers, participated in the Hour of Code, an international initiative and campaign designed to encourage more students to explore classes and careers related to Computer Science, on Dec. 11.

As the capstone event of National Computer Science Education week, students in STEM classes at High Point navigated through a series of visual, user friendly coding challenges related to Star Wars, MineCraft, Disney’s Frozen, and Angry Birds.

The collaborative nature of the day allowed teachers from different departments to work together. For example, Business and Computer Science teacher Dan Hennings and Math Teacher Linda Abrams planned together over the days leading up to the event, discussing the interdisciplinary nature of coding.

“The most frequently asked question I was asked during the Hour of Code was … Can we do this again tomorrow," Henning said. Science teacher Stacey Zaremba shared,

The experience inspired ninth-grader Vincent Fasino in Brian Emma’s 21st Century Skills Seminar class to teach his own lesson on coding.

"I love to code and wanted to share that with the other students in our class so I developed an advanced coding lesson to teach the class and I loved it," he said.

“The interest level was the driving factor on how the students experienced their Hour of Code," said Brian Drelick, High Point's supevisor of STEM. "Whereas some students explored the more popular coding platforms related to Star Wars or Frozen, others drifted off into some very high level coding and programming. Their freedom to explore, solve problems, and to apply computational thinking is really the lasting value of this experience. We really hope this is a big step towards building our computer science program here.”

For more resources or information related to this event or to try coding yourself, please refer to www.code.org.