Eric.ed.gov – 2,445 Hours of Code: What I Learned from Facilitating Hour of Code Events in High School Libraries

This article describes a school librarian’s experience with initiating an Hour of Code event for her school’s student body. Hadi Partovi of Code.org conceived the Hour of Code “to get ten million students to try one hour of computer science” (Partovi, 2013a), which is implemented during Computer Science Education Week with a goal of bringing awareness of the value of including computer science in school curricula, and increasing future job opportunities for students worldwide. The author organized the Hour of Code event for her school with the expectation that the event would increase awareness among administrators, teachers, students, and parents of the value of a computer science education and create a demand for more computer science education in her school district. Students should be exposed to computer programming (preferably much earlier than high school) because by 2020 there will be one million more U.S. jobs in computing than people to fill those positions. Sixty percent of all projected math and science occupations will be in computing jobs. The author encourages all school librarians to introduce their students to computer programming in any capacity.