By Claire Burnett, The Current Co-Editor-in-Chief
On Wednesday, December 6, in place of Hawktime, River Hill hosted their first school-wide Hour of Code since before Covid. Organized by Code.org, the Hour of Code aims to introduce students to computer science and demystify coding.
Mr. Boothe, a computer science teacher who helped organize the event, described how “the main goal is to give students who haven’t taken any kind of programming class the chance to see what programming is about on an easy scale. Then, hopefully it will inspire them to further look into it, take courses and possibly look into it as a career.”
Many students can recall doing the Hour of Code in elementary and middle school, where they would code for the full hour, playing popular games such as Code Monkey, where they code for a monkey to walk to a banana while avoiding increasingly difficult obstacles. Freshman Saahithi Veeramachaneni commented, “I didn’t do the Hour of Code this year because I had a Spanish test, but it was fun when I was younger in elementary school.” She added that, “At the time, I hated technology, but the Hour of Code was always really fun to me because it was just playing games and it didn’t seem like coding.”
During Hawktime, students were shown a slideshow with a short informational video about computer science and its practical applications. Although Hawktime is only 30 minutes rather than a full hour, students still got a useful preview of coding. As technology becomes more advanced, many different fields continue to have a demand for computer science knowledge, so it is important that students are being introduced to it.
Despite the good intentions of the event, students had various feelings towards the Hour of Code. Some students were upset that they had to miss out on Hawktime activities, such as club meetings and getting help from teachers. With such short notice about Hour of Code, many clubs planned Hawktime meetings but had to cancel them only one day prior.
In addition to scheduling conflicts, the Hour of Code was ultimately less than the allotted half an hour because the presentation at the beginning took away some time from coding. Some students felt as if they didn’t have enough time to fully get into the game they were playing. The only other common issue was that some students simply didn’t participate in the Hour of Code and instead completed schoolwork or went on their phones.
Although some students weren’t fans of the event, many students appreciated the designated time to play games and learn about coding. Some students enjoyed classic Hour of Code games like Code Monkey, while others explored new games that integrate AI into coding.