Record Numbers Participate in Hour of Code 2021 at YISS
Record numbers of students and faculty at YISS participated in the Hour of Code 2021. 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, we had our highest number of student participants yet, with 592 students completing at least one Hour of Code activity. The most popular activities included Minecraft and Star Wars-themed challenges and, in the high school, more difficult game-building challenges such as “Don’t Yeet the Yeti.” All of the activities varied in difficulty from simple block coding for our beginner coders, to more complex activities that had students coding in HTML, 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.
We can’t thank our students and staff enough for their willingness to step outside of their comfort zone and learn new coding skills during this week.
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 a Botley the Coding Robot Activity Set, for 3rd-5th grade students the prize was an Artie 300, for 6th-8th grade students the prize was 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 Tuesday, December 7, and posted on Schoology. Congratulations to the Hour of Code raffle prize winners who were notified this week and will receive their prizes before the winter break.
Thank you to all of our YISS Guardians for taking part and making Hour of Code 2021 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 2021 and go Beyond an Hour of Code!