Prep Talk
75% of Prep Students Participated in “The Hour of Code”
Posted January 6th, 2015
More than 75% of St. Augustine Prep students joined nearly 25 million students from more than 65,000 schools participating in “The Hour of Code,” a world-wide learning event celebrating Computer Science Education Week in early December. Such tech industry giants as Microsoft, Google and Apple were highly visible in supporting the Hour of Code this year. Apple went so far as to sponsor Hour of Code workshops in all of their stores worldwide! Since its inception several years ago, more than 90 million students have written nearly 4.5 billion lines of code in the Hour of Code project.
Students in the Prep AP Computer Science class adopted the Hour of Code as a class project and they challenged all students on campus to complete as a homework assignment a one-hour online programming tutorial. Participation was coordinated through Prep Math classes, and several class periods reported 100% participation. Considering that prior to this year, less than 10% of Prep students were involved in any Prep curricula utilizing code programming, the 75% response rate by Prep students far exceeded expectations.
The Hour of Code was envisioned as a project to show people, globally, that one day it may become as important to learn computer programming as it is to learn reading, writing, math and science. Today computer code touches nearly everything used in our daily life. Such common items as cars, televisions, refrigerators and washing machines all operate through the use of computer programming. Industry data confirm that computing jobs outnumber students graduating into the field by 3-to-1, and computer science is foundational for every industry today. Although our lives are becoming more dependent upon computers, nearly ninety percent of schools in America do not teach computer science as a curriculum. St. Augustine Prep is proud of the fact that the school has featured computer science curricula for several decades!
Shown here participating in the Hour of Code are Juniors Connor Mills and Mark Keller.
For more information about the Hour of Code, see http://code.org.