St. Mary School is busily preparing for the holiday season by collecting toys to take to Appalachia and by getting everyone in the mood ...
Christmas Spirit
St. Mary School is busily preparing for the holiday season by collecting toys to take to Appalachia and by getting everyone in the mood with the annual Christmas concert led by music teacher Kristina Romano.
Hour of Code Celebrated
In China, every student takes computer science to graduate high school. In the United States, 90 percent of schools don’t even teach it. It’s time for us to catch up to the 21st century. We know that regardless of what our students do when they grow up, whether they go into medicine, business, politics or the arts, knowing how to build technology will give them the confidence and know-how to succeed.
The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in more than 180 countries. It is a nationwide one-hour activity during the week of Dec. 7. Students of all ages can choose from a variety of self-guided tutorials with the purpose of getting all students excited about coding. Tutorials work on any modern browser, tablet, or smartphone or even with no computer at all. The Hour of Code is a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to make coding easier to understand and show that anybody can learn the basics.
During the week of Dec. 7, St. Mary students in grades 6-8 participated in one Hour of Code tutorials choosing from the following: Star Wars, Minecraft, Frozen or Angry Birds, all created by code.org.
St. Mary sixth-grader Elizabeth Daugherty said she was so inspired by her trials at school with Minecraft that she went home and gave other tutorials a try.
She said, “I liked trying to plan the movements and would work on it again.”
Throughout the rest of the year, St. Mary School will continue to periodically work on different coding programs including grades 3-5. Check out the program by using the site https://code.org/learn.
The event is a chance for everyone to see what computer science is about.
St. Mary’s hope it will spark interest in students to keep learning. Research also shows that kids pick up programming concepts before they know how to read and write. In fact, their brains are more receptive to computer languages at a young age, just like foreign languages.
“The Hour of Code is designed to demystify code and show that computer science is not rocket-science, anybody can learn the basics,” said Hadi Partovi, founder and CEO of Code.org. “Over 100 million students worldwide have tried an Hour of Code. The demand for relevant 21st century computer science education crosses all borders and knows no boundaries.”
