Seventy-five Burnaby elementary school students got to try their hand at coding in one of the largest video game studios in the world this week.
Students from Cascade Heights, Westridge, Stoney Creek and Lindhurst elementary schools were at EA Canada’s Burnaby studio Monday for Hour of Code, a one-hour event held all over the world in the second week of December to introduce students to computer science and demystify code.
“I really really like it because video games are basically my life,” Westridge Grade 4 student Hayley Baines told the NOW during the three-hour EA event.
She said her favourite part of the visit to the 450,000-square-foot EA campus near Burnaby Hospital was the Star Wars: The Force Awakens-themed coding exercise.
“Because you actually get to do coding,” she said, “and I do block coding a lot. It’s really fun.”
Baines’s partner and fellow Westridge Grade 4 student Joanna Hadadi hadn’t done coding before, but she said it was less complicated than she thought.
“It’s really really fun,” she said. “I can do it.”
This is the first time EA has hosted an Hour of Code event.
“We’ve had thousands and thousands of students through here, but this is the first time we’re doing Hour of Code,” said EA outreach manager Wendell Harlow.
Until now, mostly high school students have visited the campus, but Harlow said elementary schools have shown increasing interest.
“We thought, ‘They’re too young,’ but now that’s the demographic, that’s the target age is Grade 2 to Grade 6,” Harlow said. “They’re already coding. It’s crazy.”
Getting on board with Hour of Code was a global initiative for the video-game maker, Harlow said, coming from its headquarters in Redwood City, Calif.
The Burnaby school district was more than happy to participate, according to director of instruction Garth Errico.
“There’s the cachet there,” he said of the local studio, which produces EA giants like NHL and FIFA.
But EA wasn’t the only place Burnaby students participated in Hour of Code.
BCIT computing instructors were scheduled to run events at Taylor Park and Marlborough elementary schools as well as Byrne Creek Secondary.
Cameron, Capitol Hill and Buckingham elementary schools and Burnaby South Secondary had their own in-house events planned as well, according to Errico.
Getting kids into coding is good for opening up future career options and more, he said.
“Actually getting in and working with a little bit of programming and coding and solving something and seeing that they can design some sort of a program and make it run, make it work is good for them,” he said. “It’s good for problem solving and creativity, helping with logic. It transfers into all aspects of their life.”
For more on Hour of Code, visit code.org.
