The hour of code

This week I had planned to participate in the #hourofcode with the school. I had everything organized but, boom! The Flu came in the way and we ended up doing two days instead of four. Two days were enough though to get a glimpse of the interest amongst students about coding and computer science. It turns out that the opportunities for jobs in computer science is not levelled with the amount of students taking computer science as a Career. 

The hour of code is an event that tries to bring this our attention and encourages more presence of computer science in schools. Because, actually, everywhere we go and almost everything we do has a computer software behind. The need is huge and the possibilities are endless. 

As a math teacher also, the connections with computer programming are tremendously strong. The designers behind the hour of code also did a great job to present it in a game-like way. For instance, in the Frozen tutorial, our first two math units this year in grade 7 got blended: the Cartesian plane and geometry. The goal was to get Elsa to make snowflakes doing ice-skating. You need to make a shake and then rotate and translate it to make a shape. It is genius! I from coding with blocks to do actual JavaScript, the possibilities are endless and it opens to me a huge array of possibilities to integrate math and computer science in my class.