On December 7-11, YISS students and faculty participated in the Hour of Code once again. The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries that takes place annually during Computer Science Education Week.

This year, despite the difficulties of conducting an event this big during Virtual/Hybrid Learning, we had an impressive total of 386 students complete the Hour of Code. These activities included Minecraft, Star Wars, and CodeMonkey themed challenges and varied in difficulty from simple block coding to more complex activities that had students coding in HTML, Python, Javascript, and Scratch. Each student who completed an Hour of Code had the opportunity to enter the prize drawing for one of this year's coding themed prizes.

This is the fourth year in a row that the Hour of Code at YISS included a prize drawing. For K-2nd grade students, the prize was for a Botley the Coding Robot Activity Set, for 3rd-5th grade students the prize was for a Star Wars R2D2 Droid, for 6th-8th grade students the prize was for a Robobloq Mechanical Building Robotic Coding Kit, and finally, our 9th-12th grade students had the opportunity to win a CoDrone Pro Programmable Drone. The prize drawing was completed on Monday, December 14, and posted on Schoology. Congratulations to the Hour of Code raffle prize winners who were notified this week and will have their prizes sent to them before the winter break.

Thank you to all of our YISS Guardians for taking part and making Hour of Code 2020 a success. If you would like to continue to develop your coding abilities or were not able to participate in Hour of Code week, we want to encourage all parents, students, and teachers to try out a coding activity at Hour of Code 2020 and go Beyond an Hour of Code!