Coding has become a large part of American culture, especially in the heart of Silicon Valley. Denali students have the chance to build these skills in the Intro to Programming Expeditions course. The course gives students the chance to learn the basics of programming so they can move on to more advanced concepts in later years.
“My favorite part is how how self-directed it is. So you have to look at the resources yourself,” Denali freshman Ella Chen said.
Other students agreed that the freedom they were given was a plus. “I don’t know, just the independence you get. Like you can do whatever you want,” Denali freshman Chase Santaga said about his favorite part of the course.
See below for a video about the Intro to Programming course:
At Summit Tahoma, there are two levels of programming courses; Intro to Programming is the second course in the sequence (which begins with Video Game Programming).
In Intro to Programming students are learning how to use the coding language to create and build digital websites, programs and even artificial intelligence. The instructor, Matthew Hesby, teaches his students the language and how to apply it to something they are creating. “It may be seem hard or overwhelming, but eventually many of those same students went off to college to study in computer science,” he said.
Programming has its own language it uses; code consists of normal letters and words but arranged in a way to make the computer be able to read it and make something happen.
“I want to work in the technological workspace so knowing how to code will definitely be important for that,” Tahoma sophomore Herschel Marcelo said.
See below for a video about the Intro to Programming course:
Whenever a player boots up their favorite game, they might wonder how the game was designed. Video games are made by either a stand-alone person or a group of developers working for a company, and the Video Game Programming Expeditions course helps prepare students for such jobs. The course exists to show students how to develop video games using two programs, Scratch and Phaser.
“Programming is a very important skill to learn nowadays,” instructor Matthew Hesby said.
Students explained the difficulty of this course: “It may seem hard at first, but through time and practice, it will become fun,” Tahoma sophomore Aiden Bowen said.
See below for a video about Video Game Programming course:
In Video Game Programming, students use coding to create their own video games; they get to make and play their own games! This course specifically introduces various coding software to students so that they can understand those tools at an in-depth level. Video Game Programming is the course taken before taking Intro to Computer Programming, and it prepares students for what is to come in the advanced course.
Matthew Hesby, the Video Game Programming Expeditions instructor, teaches students how to use special elements and codes to operate and run a video game. Students in this course learn how to code and create video games of their own; they can then play the games they made in class.
Mr. Hesby said, “[In] the Video Game Programming Expedition, we start off with a program called Scratch [where] students make programs using that, and then we switch over to a program called Fazer; afterward they use Javascript, and then students are able to choose from there which one they want to use going on. It’s a lot of work time; students are sitting down, making stuff, building.”
He continued: “Students don’t just program; they also have to draw out their sprites like: coming up with dialogue, coming up with stories and brainstorming what their games are going to be about.”
Rainier freshman Mark Solomita said, “[Video Game Programming] is interesting because it’s fun to see other people’s creations, and you find out what you could do with the knowledge you have with making video games; you don’t know your capacity when it comes to programming, but then you find out what you can do and it’s really satisfying to see your final product.”
See below for a video about the Video Game Programming course:
Intro to Programming gives students the freedom to explore new skills in coding; it is the advanced version of Video Game Programming offered to sophomores and up. Students in this class get to learn how to use codes to instruct a computer to do a certain task.
Rainier sophomore Lam To said, “The Intro to Computer Programming class is usually [a] similar format for each interval. [Mr. Hesby] has some checkpoints for us to do which we have to complete to get the basics of what the project is and then, after that, we customize and use what we learn to make something new. So it’s a lot of freedom and a lot of picking your own projects.”
Matthew Hesby, the Intro to Computer Programming Expeditions teacher, said his class consists of a lot of work time, reading and writing. During class, students need to be constantly researching online in order to complete their projects.
“In Intro to Programming, we do three projects that are web-development-based, so we start off with HTML and CSS, and then we add in Javascript. The fourth project we do is a competitive AI game where the students program their own AI and then they plug it into the game so that the AIs all kind of fight against each other,” Mr. Hesby added.
See below for a video about the Intro to Computer Programming course:
The Expeditions course Intro to Programming teaches students how to program with JavaScript, HTML and CSS with a focus on web development. For the first three Expeditions rounds, students focus on web development, and, in the last round, they do a fun and competitive A.I. game.
Intro to Programming teacher Matthew Hesby said students “gain a lot of skills around being self-directed, looking things up, learning things on their own, asking for help and dealing with being frustrated and struggling with learning something that’s new to a lot of them.”
Mr. Hesby also added, “Students should take Intro to Programming if they have even a little bit of interest in programming. But they should also go into it knowing that it’s a class where there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.” This course is a UC-approved course; it is designed for sophomores and up.
When asked whether this course would be challenging for students, Shasta sophomore Vincent Chu said, “This course challenges your mind to think of creative ways to solve a test or programming … If you don’t work enough in class, the workload can be quite heavy. However, it is mostly how you use the class time.”
See below for a video about the Intro to Programming course:
In Matt Hesby’s Intro to Programming course, students gain fundamental skills used to complete their projects for the class. Students create computer-generated artwork, an artificial intelligence, and everything in-between.
Most recently, students created AIs to compete against each other in a game. Mr. Hesby explained the importance of learning programming: “In the future, more and more jobs are going to require people to know how to program.” He believes these skills are valuable, especially so because of our location in Silicon Valley.
