COURTLAND
Last week, 130 Southampton High School students joined in on the largest education event in the world by participating in online computer science tutorials with Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, professional basketball player Chris Bosh and characters from the phone app Angry Birds. The Hour of Code, a global movement dedicated to encouraging more students to pursue a career in computer sciences, coincided with Computer Science Education Week.

“Southampton High School students are fortunate to have the opportunity to use technology in their classes along with the business and online classes available,” Southampton business education teacher Natasha Preau said. “However, 90 percent of American schools don’t teach computer science. Fewer students are learning how computers work than a decade ago. Girls and minorities are severely underrepresented. And yet, technology is increasingly shaping almost every aspect of how we live our lives.”

The program used by students was provided at no cost by Code.org, the nonprofit organization that created The Hour of Code to encourage people of all ages to learn how to write code. Instead of asking students to write JavaScript code from scratch, the activities turned basic commands into colored blocks and asked students to use logic to arrange them in the order in which they needed to go to complete the task.

According to Code.org founder Hadi Partovi, the inaugural event in 2013 attracted 15,000 schools across the country. This year, the organization was expecting millions of students from 180 country around the world to participate.

“The Hour of Code, we hope, will continue to spark a creative fire that students might otherwise never discover,” Partovi said in a statement.

Preau, meanwhile, added that it is projected in the next ten years that there will be close to 1.4 million jobs in the computer science field and that only 400,000 people will be qualified to fill these positions.

“This is why we are taking the time out to expose our children to an additional opportunity that is available to them,” Preau said.

Student Cody Council added, “The Hour of Code was helpful it teaches you that programming is not as difficult as some may think and that this is technique that can be helpful even if you are not considering majoring in computer sciences. It allows you to have to think critically, which is a skill that a lot of students my age don’t get to practice enough.”