Tippecanoe County students involved in global movement

TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI) – It’s a global movement, reaching tens of millions of students in more than 180 countries this week.

The Hour of Code is reaching about 4,000 students, within 100 classrooms right here in Tippecanoe County.

The international initiative is an introduction to computer science and is designed to demystify code and show that anybody can learn the basics.

WLFI-TV visited Battle Ground Elementary school where a classroom full of young minds were doing some big tasks behind the computer screen.

As part of Hour of Code, the students learned basic computer coding.

“It’s really just to get students more interested in computer science,” Coordinator of Collective Learning at TSC, Sarah Margeson said.

Margeson said only one in every four schools in the United States offers computer science to their students.

“Indiana offers computer science as math and science credits,” Margeson explained. “But, again, only 25-percent are actually offering those courses to the students.”

That’s why TSC is spending time this week participating in an international effort to introduce the science to students of all ages.

“A non-profit organization called Code.org hosts, what they call, an Hour of Code,” Margeson said. “They encourage students and teachers to get onto the website and do any of their coding activities for atleast an hour.”

Some students are even getting a little extra help with their activity from some ‘Angry Birds.’

“What the students can do is run their code,” Margeson said. “So, they pull in what we call block coding and they run it and see if they can make the angry bird do what they want it to. So, a lot of the blocks they’re using today are: move forward, turn left and turn right. They’re just really basic commands.”

Basic commands that Margeson said will help students with other vital skills.

“At the end of the hour, we were really getting into some of the repeat commands,” Margeson said. “So, students were learning some multiplication while also learning some coding.”