An Hour of Code in Review

Bridget Bator ’14

Mitch Baker ’14

Staff Writers

On Thursday, December 12th, 70 Nouvel students participated in “An Hour of Code”, a national program that celebrates Computer Science Education Week. The week began on Monday December 9th and ended the following Sunday on December 15th. In that week, over 533 million lines of code were written by students across the United States. In Nouvel alone, 15,000 lines of code were written in just one hour! The program proved to be a huge success. When students entered the library, they were able to grab a snack and a bottle of water and learn to write code through tutorials. For those that are not familiar with computer science, “code” simply means the list of directions that a computer follows when you use a program. For example, all video games are composed of thousands and thousands of lines of code that each perform a different function. This is how you are able to play the game and control the avatar. During “An Hour of Code” at Nouvel, many beginner students learned how to write code through an Angry Birds tutorial. In this program, students had to create a list of step-by-step actions that would help the Angry Bird to get to its destination quickly. After finishing this tutorial, many students then explored others, such as Python. In this more advanced tutorial, students had to write a program for an automated chat-bot such as the ones that were used on old-school AIM. These bots give automatic responses depending on what the user says to it. For example, if a user were to ask the bot “What is your name?” , the bot would respond with a pre-determined response such as “My name is Eliza. What’s up?” The conversation then continues from there. The difficult part is that these bots must be prepared for any kind of response from the user. This tutorial proved to be both challenging and entertaining as you could program the bot to say anything that you want. After participating in “An Hour of Code’ students were given a survey to fill out about their experiences. Based on the overwhelmingly positive reaction, Nouvel is now going to offer a Programming Club for any students that wish to further their computer science education. This club will start up after Christmas break. Be sure to watch the announcements to catch the first meeting. Join the Programming Club and become a code-writing machine!