Now pay attention, mom and dad

YAKIMA — Second grader Harris Jolliffe was glued to a computer screen at Whitney Elementary School on Thursday evening.

“Flappy Bird,” a simple but challenging computer game in which users press the space bar to keep Flappy airborne while avoiding obstacles, was on the left-hand side of his screen. On the right were a series of written commands.

“I’m creating coding,” the 8-year-old said. “You create your own game.”

Harris had never coded before, but this night he was dragging a variety of written instructions into a column that would determine how Flappy responded to keyboard entries. This dictated aspects such as the bird’s speed or what movements would end the game. Then he would test it out to see if he had coded Flappy properly.

With each level, Harris said the task got more challenging. But that’s what he liked about it: the challenge of figuring out how to code Flappy properly, and then testing out the difficult game.

His mom, Elizabeth Jolliffe, loved it, too.

“He gets blocked but then he goes back and changes (the code) and he gets through the obstacles,” she said. “I love it. … It’s nice to get the kids comfortable with the computer. Technology is advancing, and I think it’s good for them to get familiar while they’re still young.”

Harris was among dozens of K-5 students who attended the Hour of Code event at Whitney in the Yakima School District with their parents.

Hour of Code is a global event that kicked off in 2014 to give students an hourlong introduction to coding to demystify it. It takes place each year during Computer Science Education Week, which wraped up Sunday. The event boasts tens of millions of students reached worldwide since its launch.

Several other schools throughout the Yakima valley participate in Hour of Code, including West Valley, East Valley and Wapato schools, according to the official Hour of Code website. This was the first year Whitney participated.

Many of the attendees Thursday night said they had never coded, while some parents were being shown the ropes by their children.

Older students worked on programming “Flappy Bird’ while students as young as kindergarten used visual coding to create a creature on a separate computer platform. Prompts would guide them to choose a color for their creature, for example. Once they clicked on a color, text code would appear on the screen beside their developing creature to represent what they had selected.

“It makes kids think outside the box,” school librarian Lori Cleveringa said. “So we do a lot of these things at school.”

Cleveringa said one of her favorite things about coding was seeing students who struggle in other areas excel in the skill.

“I can think of one child in particular who goes to interventions, he struggles, and he’s become our helper in his classroom because he gets it. For him, this kind of thinking is how his brain is functioning,” she said.

She said the event had been a huge success, with several parents expressing happy surprise over their children’s coding abilities. The goal was to equip kids with basic coding skills that could be developed into writing text code as their schooling continues.

Margaux Vautour, mom to 7-year-old Johnathan Tweeten, asked Cleveringa for guidance on how to access the coding software at home.

“I think it’s super cool,” Vautour said of the event. “I think (coding) is important with how the world is changing so much. That’s why we came. When I saw computer science, I was like, ‘Wow, we’ve got to check this out.’ ... It’s just everywhere. Computer science is everywhere.”

Raina Goodwin felt similarly. Her 11-year-old daughter Haylie Goodwin has been coding for three years and talks about it frequently, but Goodwin rarely understands what she is explaining. Her daughter begged to attend the new event.

“She loves to do this kind of stuff. She talks about it all the time. As far as knowing what’s going on, I don’t really understand it,” Goodwin said.

On Thursday, Haylie was guiding her mom and 9-year-old brother, Javin, through the process. As a visual learner, her mom said she was finally beginning to understand Haylie’s hobby, and now she felt equipped to join in in the future.