COAL TOWNSHIP - More than 300 students from first to 12th grades are participating in the Hour of Code event.
During Computer Science Education Week, students are being given their first taste of coding by participating in a national hour of computer science instruction called the Hour of Code. The goal is to get students to think, create and have fun, all while learning some computer programming.
Elementary students are doing "unplugged" activities, such as writing commands to stack cups. Some high school students are using Java Script programs to create greeting cards.
New programming jobs are growing three times faster than the number of people entering the field, students were told. More than 50 percent of all math and science jobs are for computer scientists.
School officials said although software powers the economy, less than 2.4 percent of college students graduate with a computer science degrees and 95 percent of schools don't teach programming.