Penngrove students pick Gates’ brain as part of ‘Hour of Code’

From transitional kindergarten students in Healdsburg to high schoolers in Petaluma, kids around Sonoma County immersed themselves in the world of computer coding this week.

They were participating in a program called Hour of Code, part of a national effort supported by President Barack Obama to introduce more students to computer science and prepare them for the jobs of the future.

“Coding is the new world language,” Healdsburg Unified School District director of curriculum and instruction Annie Millar said, describing it as a skill, like English or math, that students will be expected to have. That’s part of why her district decided to participate in Hour of Code this year. “It’s just rising in importance that students have the experience of those thinking processes.”

Since the nonprofit website code.org launched the initiative last year, encouraging students around the country to try at least an hour of coding, participation has grown widely. About 15 million students tried out computer science during last year’s weeklong event; this year organizers hope 100 million students will join.

Participation is growing in Sonoma County, said Matt O’Donnell, a 21st century innovation specialist with the county office of education.

“Where last year, there were just a couple of early adopter teachers, now there are schoolwide efforts,” he said.

Such was the case at Penngrove Elementary, where Principal Amy Fadeji hopes that almost all students will get a chance to try coding during the week. On Wednesday, Tracee Mainaris’s fifth-grade class got a special reward for participating in Hour of Code: A 20-minute video chat with Microsoft founder and computer pioneer Bill Gates.

“Just imagine Bill Gates is right here,” said James Bennion, a student in Mainaris’s class, waiting eagerly with about 30 other students for the chat to begin and Gates’ image to be cast onto the class’s white board. He and his classmates had spent time earlier in the week learning to code through a series of games on code.org, as well as learning about Gates.

“I think Bill Gates is a pretty cool guy. He invented Microsoft,” he said. “I’m excited about seeing him and rubbing it in other peoples’ faces.”

Once the chat began with the Penngrove students and six other classrooms around the country, one Penngrove student, Silvana Sessi, got to ask Gates a question her class had formulated about how he founded Microsoft.

Gates, in his signature black-rimmed glasses and a black button-up shirt, replied, “I was lucky to be exposed to the idea of computers and software at a young age.” He added that it helped to be in a country where “the idea of starting a company when you’re quite young is very possible.”

He also gave advice for how to become proficient with computers - read a lot - and talked about how computers could help with the eradication of polio, something he’s working toward through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

While not every class got a chance to talk with Gates, schools around the county embraced Hour of Code in other ways. Numerous schools in the Petaluma City Schools district participated, said Lori Deen, district technology coordinator. Likewise for Healdsburg Unified School District, where transitional kindergarten teacher Kathryn Jurik went so far as to attend a daylong training about coding and plans to continue teaching students the skill throughout the year.

“I’ve always tried to use the technology we have in our classrooms,” she said, explaining why she sought out the training. “But this is more than using tech. It’s learning to create tech. It’s like teaching the alphabet so you can learn to read rather than just listening to stories.”

All the students at La Tercera Elementary in Petaluma’s Old Adobe Union School District are participating, and the school was planning a special event Thursday night where kids and their parents can code together with help from Sonoma State University’s Society of Physics and Kenilworth Junior High School students.

Other participating districts include West Sonoma County High and Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified.

At Penngrove Elementary, many teachers decided to dedicate more than just an hour to coding. Wednesday morning, a class of kindergarten students took cross-legged seats in front of a large screen to practice coding with their teacher, Adrienne Olufs, for the third day in a row. The exercises were designed as games, and the students were clearly comfortable with them.

“Ms. Olufs, can I help you with this stuff?” asked one eager boy, Cayven Smith-Kennedy. “You can all help me,” she responded with a smile.

With the students, she walked through a series of exercises using the game “Angry Birds.” Together, they had to choose directions, or code, to give the computer so that the birds would move in certain ways.

Cayven shouted out a series of directions the bird should take: “Move forward! Turn left!” and when the bird successfully reached his target, a pig, Cayven celebrated. “I was right! I was right!”

Teacher Michele Andersen’s fifth-grade class also had spent several days practicing coding exercises, and some of the students were now creating their own games.

Andersen sat at a laptop with Keanu Jahncke, trying to play the game he’d just created.

“She has to get the squirrel to touch the zombie without hitting the fireballs,” Keanu explained as Andersen focused on the keyboard.

“I’m not doing so well,” she said. “I keep dying. There are too many fireballs.”

“Yeah, that’s the hard part,” Keanu observed.

“I think you need less fireballs,” Andersen laughed. “I’m not a video game connoisseur.”

Andersen said she had never done coding before and that she was following in the footsteps of teachers who were brave enough to try it last year. Impressed by how it had gone so far, she planned to have her class continue coding during computer lab time throughout the year.

“There’s some really cool lessons in there.”

Staff Writer Jamie Hansen blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach her at 521-5205 or jamie.hansen@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jamiehansen.