Dev Day Yuma will give students taste of coding
Up to “Scratch” is what high school students attending Dev Day Yuma will be doing Saturday morning.
About 100 students are registered for Yuma County’s first “coding event,” similar to one put on in Gilbert called the Spark App League and another called CodeDay in Maricopa County. CodeDay in Phoenix this year is planned for May 2021.
Dev Day Yuma is all about bringing mentors and volunteers and students together to build an app or a game using a preprogramming tool called Scratch, said Yuma County Superintendent Tom Tyree, whose office is putting on the event.
About 100 students from area schools are expected, including those from eastern Yuma County, said Tyree and Brenda Warnock, Arizona Western College’s technology director.
Students are split into teams, and each has a mentor from the college’s IT department or other sponsor volunteer, Warnock said. Dev Day Yuma is designed to be a very “hands on” event.
AWC is providing a dedicated wireless hub for the event and laptops for the students to use, as well as the use of the Schoening Conference Center. The planning group did a mock- run through of events on Friday to see how the wireless would handle the bandwidth needed. There are more hot spots on reserve if needed, she said.
“For every plan, we have a backup plan and another backup plan,” Warnock said, “just in case.”
The event’s sponsors include the Helios Foundation, Trax International, the Yuma Union High School District, the Southwest Technical Education District of Yuma (STEDY), the Yuma campus of the University of Arizona, Arizona Western College, and the Yuma Chamber of Commerce.
Several sponsors are scheduled to speak to students during lunch, including Conrad Hernandez of Trax, to talk about coding as a career.
The Dev Day Yuma team consists of leaders from all of the aforementioned organizations: Julie Rodriguez, marketing consultant Bob Cuckler, UA lecturer Samuel Peffers, Tanya Hodges and Lori Honeycutt, the Yuma Union High School District’s director of career and technical education.
Videos for the event were made by funds from the Helios Foundation. The current Dev Day Yuma project was formed in the summer of 2016.
For more information, check out http://www.devdayyuma.com .