Fourteen students attended Hour of Code, a workshop taught by Krish Narayanan, the Women’s Computer Science Club advisor, Monday afternoon in a Pray-Harrold computer lab.
“It's our first offering and students were very excited,” Narayanan said. “I'm hoping to do this in the coming years, possibly more than once because I know it's last week of classes.”
Students came in, sat at the computers and completed a series of simple coding tasks. The tasks weren’t any more complicated than dragging and dropping pre-selected lines of code into a program, then launching to see if it ran correctly. The students completed as many levels as they could.
The Women in Computer Science club hosted the workshop. This is a club of female EMU students in the computer science field and male supporters with a mission to increase the presence of women in the field.
Brianna Wurtsmith, a representative from Women in Computer Science, said that the ratio of men and women at the hour was about typical.
“It's pretty typical – there were a lot more dudes than ladies in this thing,” Wurtsmith said. “We had a decent turnout, and even some high school students turned out.”
At 4:30 p.m., the winner won a free t-shirt and the group divided into two different groups. Students programming for a mobile Android app stayed in room 504, while four other students chose to go to do a different type of programming.
Gus Ikeji, the computer science department head, came in at this time to check on progress.
He said one of the benefits of this type of exercise is reaching students who wouldn’t ordinarily consider computer science or programming.
“This is a way to get them in, introduce students to programming and if they like it, then perhaps they could become majors or minors,” he said.
