As part of National Computer Science Education Week(December 6-12), a team of volunteers from Google Ann Arbor visited our school on December 10th. The team from Google held a Pep rally for our 5th grade students, getting them excited about Computer Science. They were introduced to the many fields and career choices that are available to computer scientists, took a virtual field trip with ‘Google Cardboard’, heard informative and inspirational talks from the Google team members and received some ‘Google Swag’ for participating.  There was a Q&A sessions with the students, who asked very informative questions to the Google team.

Following the pep rally, a select group of students got a chance to do an “Hour of Code” Session with Google engineers and volunteers. The Hour of Code activity is a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify code(computer programming) and show that anybody can learn the basics. Students participated in coding activities featuring Star Wars, Flappy Bird and Anna and Elsa from Frozen. They also participated in an activity where they learned to animate their names using Javascript coding. The students were ENGAGED, EXCITED, AND IMPRESSIVE! Many thanks to the team from Google for coming out! We were all ecstatically happy at the way the event turned out, and look forward to more events in the future.

For more information on Hour of Code, visit the official website: www.code.org.