Florida International University School of Computing and Information Sciences, the Miami-Dade County Office of Commissioner Juan C. Zapata, LAB Miami, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Miami-Dade College, and the Beacon Council, inspired by Code.org, hosted “Code Fest Miami” during Computer Science Education Week, December 9-15, 2013. Code.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting computer science education, created a nationwide campaign calling on every K-12 student in America to participate in an “Hour of Code.” The initiative engaged schools, teachers, and parents across the country to help introduce more than 15 million students of all ages to computer programming during Computer Science Education Week.
Throughout the week, Miami-Dade County Public Schools students participated in several in-school activities, online contests, workshops, and a grand coding finale called CodeFest Miami 2013 at FIU, all geared around giving every student the opportunity to write a computer program.
- Teachers took their students to computer labs in their school, to go through tutorials on Scratch, a kid-friendly programming language created at MIT (https://scratch.mit.edu/).
- Beacon Council members sent their IT professionals to mentor students, at area schools, in programming, and explain to them about the many career opportunities for those who know how to write code.
- Students of all grades joined an online contest hosted on Edmodo, where they submitted over 500-holiday greeting card animations using Scratch.
- The top 20 greeting card winners and District students were invited to CodeFest Miami 2013 at FIU, to take part in a team-based computer programming activity, where students were asked to solve a challenge and present their solution to the group.
