The Hour Of Code

I have written many times about the Hour Of Code here at AVC.

It is the highlight of the annual Computer Science Education Week which is the first week of December, which is this week.

Yesterday Marco Argenti, Goldman Sachs’ CIO, and I went with NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks to the Hospitality Management High School in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan to do an Hour of Code with the students there.

In the class we attended students were using the Scratch programming environment to make a small robot move around a course while also navigating some real world problems.

In this photo you can see three young women with their robot and a laptop with Scratch on it:

At the end of that exercise, the students got the opportunity to ask Marco and his colleagues about working as a software engineer. This is a post the Goldman team wrote about the importance of this work.

Many AVC readers know that getting computer science education into every building in the NYC public schools has been a long standing passion project of mine. It’s hard work getting the business community engaged with this work and supporting it financially.

But every time I get the opportunity to go into the schools and see the teachers and students working on computer science problems, I get a boost of energy in my system to keep going and push even harder.

I was particularly excited and pleased to see Chancellor Banks so engaged and excited about what he saw yesterday.

Chancellor Banks and his team at the Dept of Education are very focused on creating pathways to rewarding careers for their students. The Chancellor calls it his “north star.” So they are a fantastic partner for this work I do and I appreciate everything the DOE, the school leaders, and the teachers do to help the young people of NYC become computational thinkers and be computer literate. It will make a big difference in their lives.