On December 13th, every fifth grade student at Allisonville Elementary will participate in the nationwide Hour of Code.  Code.org, in partnership with Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and many others, has created various tutorials to expose children to writing code.

Learning and writing code is very important because there currently are not enough Americans in the workforce with these computer programming skills, and the gap only continues to grow.  Also, women and minorities are extremely under-represented in the field of computer science.  Teacher at Allisonville Elementary Steve Auslander says, “We want to change that!”  

“At Allisonville, we want to plant the seed in the young minds of our fifth graders that this is a possible career path.  Also, as President Obama explained when talking about Hour of Code, we want our students to not just download and ap, we want for them to DESIGN the ap,” continues Mr. Auslander. 

Allisonville fifth grade classes will share the school’s laptop cart throughout the day on Friday.  Each student will participate in at least one of the various tutorials, such as the Angry Birds Tutorial, where they will learn code through various lessons, all with the outcome being to program an Angry Bird to catch a Pig.  

The goal for this Hour of Code event is to inspire district fifth graders to take action and learn more about computer sciences and coding.  

For more information, visit this link where President Obama encourages schools to participate in the Hour of Code. http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/9/5191162/hour-of-code-computer-science-campaign-obama-cantor-support

Additional information can be found at  http://code.org