Council Bluffs – Southwest Iowa
Nearly 1,000 Iowa Junior High Students Learned to Code Today. That’s Good News.
Today, with the help of the AIM Institute, nearly 1,000 students at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Council Bluffs learned the fundamentals of computer programming as part of the international Hour of Code initiative.
Principal Mike Naughton expressed his excitement over every student getting a firsthand experience with coding during their science classes.
“Anytime you can get kids interested in technology, it’s a great accomplishment,” Naughton said.
In 8th grade science teacher Preston Vorthmann’s room, students huddled over screens and completed a series of games involving blocks of code. This easy-to-learn coding language, called Scratch, introduces the operational concepts of programming in a kid-friendly format. Rather than typing out daunting strings of variables and if-then statements, students create algorithms by assembling code blocks logically, as if fitting puzzle pieces together.
