With a little drag-and-drop, Driver Elementary School fifth-grader Alex Miniare maneuvers his Star Wars drone, BB-8, through a desert scrap yard.

Nearby, fifth-graders Katya Karlov and Mia Cooks build virtual Minecraft worlds by moving drag–and-drop blocks.

It’s all part of Driver Elementary School’s participation in Hour of Code, an international effort by the nonprofit organization Code.org. The campaign is designed to spark students’ interest in computer science and coding basics.

More than 100 million students worldwide have taken part since Hour of Code’s debut in 2013, according to the organization’s website.

More than 300 Driver students are spending an hour apiece learning computer coding and programming during Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 7-13, said Mary Rogers, the school’s gifted resource education teacher and organizer of the event.

“We just want them to experience computer science … and maybe plant a seed,” Rogers said.

Code.org uses coding tutorials that feature popular games and characters: Minecraft, Angry Birds, Frozen and Star Wars. With each mouse click, the children are actually writing code that moves their characters.

Rogers warns her students in advance that each step is progressively more difficult.

“It’s going to get hard, and you will make a ton of mistakes,” she said. “You will learn from them and come back to solve the problems.”

The coding exercises help students strengthen their problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, fifth-grade teacher Margaret Shermer said.

 

“We have to teach them resilience … and that it’s okay to fall flat, then pick yourself up and start again,” Shermer said. That’s a valuable life lesson in today’s instant-gratification world, she added.

As he moved his Star Wars drone around the screen, Alex Miniare, 10, said he was having fun.

“I like how you can control whether it goes up, down or move in any direction,” he said. “It’s easy now, but it’s probably going to get harder.”

Mia Cooks said the Minecraft project was her first time experimenting with coding.

“It’s kind of hard to figure out which way to turn it,” said Cooks. “It makes you think about what goes into computer games.

“It’s not just something you control. Someone had to do a lot of thinking to make the computer games that we enjoy.”