MALVERN – If you peered into Malvern Prep’s Learning Commons during the School’s daily “Community Time” one day last month, you would have seen glowing plastic orbs that glided across the carpet, made 90 degree turns on table tops, stopped, started, reversed direction, all seemingly on their own. If you looked closer, you may have figured out that Malvern students, and some adventurous teachers, were controlling these spheres through an iPad app.
Nick Villano (center with knit hat), a sophomore from Exton, demonstrates how to control a Sphero robot with a code-stacking app through his iPad.
These students were participating in the national Hour of Code, an initiative designed to dispel some of the myths about computer programming.
“Many people think computer programming is difficult and something that only nerds and hackers can do,” says Science Department Leader Kevin Quinn. “Through Hour of Code, we hope to show that anyone can program and that it is fun to do.”
Sophomore Nick Villano of Exton is in Quinn’s AP Computer Science class, and he drew a crowd as he was showing off some nifty tricks with what is officially called a Sphero through the company’s SPRK app. Villano used the app, which allows you to stack pre-set lines of code or create your own custom code, to navigate the robot-ball through an obstacle course of hills and turns—definitely not what one would expect to see at a computer programming event.
Malvern Science Department Leader, Kevin Quinn (left), hopes more students will be interested in learning about computer programming by hosting more Hour of Code sessions at the school.
Soon the Learning Commons was filled with students sending off the Spheros in all directions, and sometimes chasing after wayward robots as they shot off course. The students were learning that coding isn’t always sitting in a dark room banging away on a keyboard, and making the connection between programming and real-world results.
“Programming is less about learning a programming language and more about learning how to frame problems and instructions in a way that a computer can understand, a skill that is valuable to everyone,” says Quinn.
Villano summed up programming as “a bunch of simple things put together to make something complicated.”
If students want to give it a try, the Spheros are still available for use in the Learning Commons – and they might just catch the good kind of programming bug.
