New College of Florida students and faculty will be helping the students at nearby Bay Haven School of Basics Plus to learn computer programming skills.
For the second straight year, New College is assisting with the school’s “Hour of Code” event during national Computer Science Education Week. Last year, students wrote more than 30,000 lines of code with guidance from the College, parent volunteers and a local entrepreneur. This year, all 600 Bay Haven students will participate.
“We’re lucky to have partnered with technology teacher Sarah Hu at Bay Haven, who has turned ‘Hour of Code’ into ‘Week of Code’ to reach every student in the school,” said David Gillman, a computer science professor at New College.
“Any hour of the week, a New College student can have an experience tutoring a few students on interesting programming problems. The problems teach kids as young as five or six real programming concepts in an accessible way,” he said.
“Hour of Code” is an initiative of Code.org, a non-profit supported by the technology industry, including Microsoft, Google, Facebook and others. Launched in 2013, nearly 300 million students worldwide – almost half of them female – have participated. From there, many go on to complete Code.org’s longer introduction to Computer Science class.
Bay Haven invites parents, community members and business leaders to a kickoff assembly on Friday, December 2, and hopes they will get involved to help students participate in the “Hour of Code” all week December 5-12.