Waterford — Quaker Hill Elementary School third- graders Tito Keifer and Jodi Connelly, age 8, faced a challenge in one of the school’s computer labs Thursday: arranging commands to provide directions for a bird to make its way to a specific spot within a maze.

“It’s kind of like a puzzle, I think,” said Connelly. That was how she defined coding, or writing a computer program.

Connelly and Keifer weren’t writing computer code, but using the cursor on the screen to arrange a string of blocks labeled north, south, east or west as part of an exercise available for free online at hourofcode.org. The blocks contained blocks of code.

The exercise was part of Hour of Code, a weeklong event intended to promote coding education globally with the goal of getting as many people as possible to spend one hour coding.

“By 2020, more than 50 percent of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) jobs are projected to be in computer science-related fields. If current trends continue, 1.4 million computer science-related jobs will be available over the next 10 years,” but there may not be a sufficient number of computer science graduates in the U.S. to fill those jobs, states a Dec. 8 White House news release pertaining to Hour of Code.

Schools throughout southeastern Connecticut registered to participate in the event, including ones in Montville, Old Lyme, Waterford, Norwich, Groton, Stonington and North Stonington, according to the Hour of Code website.

The nonprofit Code.org, which organized Hour of Code, selected Quaker Hill to receive a $10,000 prize to purchase technology. One school from each state was selected to receive funds, according to hourofcode.org. Quaker Hill Principal Christopher Discordia said his school’s selection was based on how it planned to get every single student at the school to program for at least one hour.

“I think every kid should have access to this,” Discordia said as a group of students played with an iPad application under the guidance of high school students, district staff and volunteers.

He said the $10,000 award the school received was just “the icing on the cake” in the day of coding activities, an event he said he’d learned about from a friend who was a programmer.

Student in grades 3 to 5 at spent an hour with a partner working on tasks similar to the one Keifer and Connelly were doing — arranging blocks of code to program simple computer games.

Younger students engaged in “unplugged” activities. Kindergarteners, for example, played with “Bee-Bots.” The small bumble bee robots respond to commands programmed by the user to move across the floor.

Waterford Public Schools K-5 technology coordinator Robyn McKenney said introducing problem-solving activities that use or are related to coding to elementary school students could prepare the students to do things like designing their own computer games as they enter middle school and high school.

“They don’t know how to write actual code, but they can make code,” McKenney said of the exercises used at Quaker Hill Thursday.

She said the free online exercises available from Code.org may eventually be incorporated into the district’s elementary school technology curriculums to expose students to coding.

The district is considering adding an elective coding class for 8th graders as well, according to Assistant Superintendent Craig Powers. He noted that the high school already offers technology classes such as computer-aided design. He said curriculum that includes coding could come up when the district does its next regular evaluation of technology curriculum for Waterford schools.

Students from Waterford High School with experience in programming who were helping Thursday at Quaker Hill said they believed computer science was just as important a topic for students to study as literature and other core subjects. They said they hoped to see the district expand availability of computer science courses at the high school.

Sophomore Joseph Lester, 15, said that while people in other fields are looking for jobs, the computer science field is looking for people.

“This is the future,” said freshman Robert Tolppi, 14.

Hour of Code also served as a launching pad for looking at curricular additions at private Catholic college preparatory school Saint Bernard School in Montville. The school participated in Hour of Code this week as well, aiming to have each student do an hour of coding exercises from hourofcode.org.

Starting in the spring semester, Saint Bernard will offer coding classes to students after school, according to the grade 6-12 school’s technology coordinator Ann Marie Jakubielski. The school has plans to add programming classes to its curriculum possibly as soon as fall 2015, she said.

Waterford High Principal Andre Hauser said one hurdle to adding coding classes at the high school level would be finding staff certified to teach computer programming. He said that for the time being, the school will continue to offer students opportunities to use knowledge of programming in activities such as helping out with events like Hour of Code.

The state Department of Education recently created a Computer Science Advisory Group to explore options such as training current staff at schools to teach coding, according to the department’s 6-12 Mathematics Curriculum and Instruction consultant Jennifer Michalek. She said the group is starting to survey districts across the state to find out if they teach programming, and if so, at what levels, and so on.

The department’s Digital Learning Consultant Marcy Reed visited Quaker Hill Thursday.

“They’re learning without realizing what’s going on,” she commented as she watched students had been work through exercises on hourofcode.org at computer stations in one of the school’s computer labs.

The exercises didn’t just teach students basic concepts of coding, but tied in aspects of geometry, reasoning and other skills, she said.

McKenney noted that the online programs made it so that teachers who might not have backgrounds in computer science could still introduce students to the subject.

Third-grader Keifer said the hour he spent coding was “like really fun.”

“It’s like challenging and entertaining,” said his coding partner Connelly.

Asked if they would consider careers in computer programming, the two emphatically said yes.

t.townsend@theday.com

Twitter: @ConnecticuTess

[naviga:iframe frameborder="0" height="240" src="http://www.tout.com/embed/touts/svz1ys" width="100%"][/naviga:iframe]