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Health & Fitness

St. John School Immersive Education Scratch Club Hosts Hour of Code

It’s not every day that a nationwide campaign is kicked is off by the President of the United States, with Google replacing its logo in support, with a workshop in every Apple retail store in America, with support from Ashton Kutcher to Shakira to Chris Bosh. It turns out computer science is a lot more mainstream than people think and Code.org’s “Hour of Code” is helping spread the good news.

The St. John School Immersive Education Scratch Club opened its doors to the entire school on Tuesday December 10th in support of the Hour of Code initiative and it was a great success. Over 20 students attended and coded their own holiday card using Scratch 2.0, a fun and easy programming tool for children created by MIT. The nationwide Hour of Code hopes to reach 10 million students by the end of the week and St. John School was happy to be part of such an historic event.

Did you know:
• Children who learn introductory computer science show improved math scores.
• 90% of K-12 schools in the U.S. do not teach computer science.
• Software jobs outnumber students 3-to-1. The gap is 1 million jobs over 10 years.
• In many countries (including China, the United Kingdom and Australia), computer science is—or soon will be—required.
• Anyone can learn the basics, starting in elementary school, but fewer than 10% of students (and just 4% of female students, 3% of students of color) take computer science classes.

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