Textbooks to Chromebooks 10- Coding

At this year's CUE conference in Palm Springs, Hadi Partovi gave a keynote presentation about his vision for increasing diversity in Computer Science courses.  For instance, Hadi points out that only 22% of students taking the Advanced Placement Exam in high school are girls while individuals of color make up only 13% of participants.  With those bleak statistics, Hadi and his brother Ali started an initiative to make changes.  At his keynote, Hadi spoke about the Hour of Code.  So on the Monday after the conference, I returned to my classes at Pepper Tree Elementary and had every 6th-grade student participate in the Hour of Code.  Currently, there are 8 coding modules students could choose from.  When students completed the module they were given the opportunity to print out a certificate verifying their participation.  We had the students add their certificate to their Google Drive.  However,  I allowed my students to continue past that one module and they were given the chance to do as many as they wanted.  Several of the students loved working on programming skills. Some even stretched themselves and began to actually write code rather than just drag the coding blocks.  There are also curriculum options for educators including a 1- day free workshop to learn how to present the curriculum to students.  Below are two screenshot images from the code.org web page: