Every day during seventh hour last week, you may have heard students being called to win prizes for “We Love to Code Week”. This week was in effort to increase interest in the coding profession. Braxton Nolan, Quartermaster of the robotics team, thought this week was a great way to bring more interest to the field.

“We love to code week is a movement by mainly our media specialists,” Nolan said, “They’re trying to get kids interested in computer science and programing, and the best way to do this is being proactive about it.”

Nolan sites the increased need of computer programmings in the employment market as the source of this movement.

“A lot of jobs are opening up where they want you to have some amount of programming under your belt,” Nolan said, “They’re trying to open you up now so it’s not as hard later.”

As inspiring a week this may be for students already interested in the field, getting newer students involved is a struggle, so the week was filled with prize incentives and fun games.

“So there’s things like the sphero races,” Nolan said, “You have these premade blocks of code that you string together to create movement, color, sounds, actions with the spheros. There are other things that are computer games that are programing where you type a lot of code to complete the set to get a specific action or to print something like a picture. You can continue and get prizes if you complete a lot of segments.”

The week encourages students to take part in programming, and students like Nolan have really taken advantage of this opportunity.

“I think it’s a good thing to have this ‘We Love to Code Week’ thing. I just wish it wasn’t only a week,” Nolan said, “As soon as I get into it, it’s already Thursday or Friday, so having it longer would be a lot more benefit for kids who are interested in it.”