Central Kitsap students were given an introductory lesson in computer programming this week as the schools took part in the “Hour of Code” international campaign to demystify computer science and show that anyone can learn the basics. The Hour of Code was held Dec. 8-14 to celebrate Computer Science Education Week.
Central Kitsap High School sophomores Kailan King, Ravyn Freeman and Jayden Upshaw were three of the 600-900 students at the school who took part in the program.
The trio used laptop computers in the school’s library to drag blocks of computer instructions into a certain order.
Each block appeared as a colored rectangle on the computer screen with a bit of adjustable text inside that described what the block did.
Freeman followed instructions at the website code.org to make a “flappy bird” game by dragging the blocks around.
The first block on Freeman’s screen read “When run,” and Freeman dragged-and-dropped a second block below it which read “set speed normal” to make the bird fly forward when the game was started.
To make the bird flap higher into the sky, Freeman connected the block “when click” to two more titled “flap” and “play wing sound” so the bird would flap its wings and make a flapping sound when clicked.
Each time a step was completed, students were tasked with adding more features to the game.
“And we had to program it so when it hits the ground the game ends,” Freeman said.
“It’s easier than I thought it would be. I thought it would be math and science,” said Upshaw.
The introductory programming course was meant to show kids the concepts of programming without having them worry about the strict syntax found in advanced programming languages according to CKHS technology teacher Jim Adamson.
“It builds that desire for that line-by-line syntax-based programming,” Adamson said.
Every industry will rely on some level of programming skill, Adamson said.
Teacher Alex Booth showed students a video where Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg talked about programming as a career.
“Like Mark Zuckerberg said, you make something in a college dorm room that a billion people log in to and they use it for their daily lives,” Booth said.
“You have a lot of power if you learn how to code and you learn how to use a computer to your advantage.”
Booth pulled up the Bureau of Labor Statistics web page and displayed the career outlook for software developers. The page showed that 220,600 new jobs in that field were needed by the year 2022. But there aren’t enough workers to fill those jobs, he said.
“When they said at the end of the video a million jobs might go unfilled, that’s realistic. A million jobs might go unfilled because people don’t know how to code.”
“Look at the median pay … right in the middle a person makes $93,000 per year,” he told the students.
Booth introduced the students to Nathan Evans, a software architect at Silverdale-based Applied Technical Systems. Evans told the students about one of his first computer programs. He had to perform a lot of data processing for a research project “and I started realizing I can’t do all of this on my own. So I had to learn to write a little bit of software and let the computer do it for me.”
“I was amazed the first time I ran a software program and saw the computer could do thousands of calculations in a couple seconds. I was hooked,” Evans told the students.
CKHS offers its students several options to learn about programming including an “Intro to Programming” class and an advanced placement computer science class where students get exposure to the JavaScript and C programming languages. The school also has a programming club that meets Thursdays, and 3D gaming and robotics programs.
To learn more, or to try a programming exercise yourself, visit the websites code.org or scratch.mit.edu.
