CITRUS COUNTY, Fla. — This week in the Bay area, students are being introduced to programming for one hour. It's a global movement called the "Hour of Code."
- Citrus County schools go "Beyond Hour of Code"
- "Hour of Code" a global movement to introduce students to coding
Millions of students are participating during computer science education week.
In Citrus County it's much bigger — they go "Beyond the Hour of Code." At Citrus County High School coding is taught year-round at the Academy of Computer Sciences. And the students are not just consumers, they're creators of content.
"It's kind of cool, but at the same time, it gets really difficult," 10th grader Dallas Loar said.
Despited the difficulties, Loar says she's up to the challenge.
"You have other people to communicate with and collaborate your ideas and so it gets easier along the way," she said.
Students learn how to use computers to create music and program cars to take a certain path. And they're using a new language most people are unfamiliar with — HTML, Java, and Python.
"The earlier we can expose children to computer science, especially young girls, minority students, to those things and computer science coding, programming. I think it's a win," Teacher Jerry Swiatek said.
At Citrus County schools they introduce coding to kids as young as 4-years-old. Some students even go to an after school coding club.
"There's a lot of technology now in the world and when we're older, there'll be a bunch more and we have to know how to communicate with technology," Natalie Paprzycki said.
Citrus County schools say they are thankful for the grants they received to help purchase the robots and other educational materials.