RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Miguel Hernandez wants to be a computer game designer one day, but when he looks around Richmond, he has a hard time seeing a path to opportunity.
“The world is moving on,” the Open High School sophomore said last Tuesday at the Science Museum of Virginia, where he was attending an “hour of code” event.
Richmond, he said, could use a gentle prod, too, to help it move along.
“There’s a lack of technology in the city,” he said.
For a few hours at the museum, the nonprofit group CodeVa tried doing its part to increase to change by hosting the event.
The event was started last year by code.org as a way to encourage people to learn at least the basics of computer programming because, as speaker after speaker said, computers rule the world and the people who rule the computers have the real power and the big paychecks.
“Anybody can learn computer science,” Cameron Wilson, the chief operating officer of code.org, told about 70 students from Bellevue Elementary and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle schools and the Mayor’s Youth Academy.
“This is basic, fundamental knowledge for the 21st century.”
Virginia Secretary of Education Anne Holton put it in terms that really caught the attention of the kids. Asking three successive questions, she elicited louder and louder and louder screams of “yes.”
“Do you play video games?” she asked.
“Do you like to make things?”
“Do you like to make money?”
She asked the adults in the room who work in technology to raise their hands, then told the kids to find those adults later and ask them about the fun, and the paychecks, that come with creating things using computers.
The star computer user of the day was Vinnie Schoenfelder, a principal at the company CapTech, who walked the students through apps from his company that allow theme park customers to traverse their amusements with the tap of a screen.
The key, he said, is learning to be a problem solver.
Do that, he told them, and “you get the opportunity to lead, and you get access to leaders early in your career.”
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Information from: Richmond Times-Dispatch, https://www.timesdispatch.com
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