If you walk by room 707 on a Wednesday afternoon, you would hear students talking in a foreign language- this is the language of coding.
Coding Club is a student organization that has been around for many years, even predating the club advisor, Orion Smith, a computer science and technology teacher who has been working at the High School for three years.
“I have a lot of experience in coding, and I ran a somewhat similar thing at my old school,” Smith said. “So, I was really happy to take this on.”
Smith was a student at ELHS himself, graduating in the class of 1997, but due to a lack of teaching opportunities in the area, he moved to Texas before coming back to East Lansing in 2022. In Texas, Smith developed an app that helped teachers take attendance during the pandemic, bridging the gap between them and their students that formed as a result of online school.
“By [creating the app], it would deal with the attendance requirements so that the teachers didn’t have to go crazy trying to figure out other ways to deal with that,” Smith said.
Inspired by Smith’s app, the club is designing an app to be used as a club attendance tracking system. At ELHS, all clubs need to take attendance as an accountability measure to ensure that clubs stay active and thriving as the year progresses. The president of the Coding Club, Kari Richards (11), wanted to make this app for ELHS due to an issue regarding attendance in clubs that she had observed.
“So, basically, what I noticed was that a lot of other clubs and Coding Club were having trouble with writing minutes, taking attendance, and submitting these to the school, because it’s kind of boring,” Richards said.
After seeing this problem around school, Richards decided that the Coding Club should make a program that takes attendance automatically, or at least simplifies the process and sends the data to administration. Since the attendance was already being put into Google Docs, the club thought it was best to use technology they learned how to use at the end of last school year.
“The technology lets you make apps out of Google products, Google Docs, Sheets and Drive,” Smith said. “You can stitch them together, and it’s fantastically useful anytime you’re just trying to manage information.”
The coding club has learned how to utilize many other programs besides Google products, from working with Minecraft Education to learning how to code a robot. Students even got comfortable enough to lead classes themselves. More recently, the club has started working on Roblox studio to create their own games.
“We would have a theme that we were working on for a month or two, and people including myself, but some of the students also, would make up something to do around that theme for each week,” Smith said.
While the Coding Club has many dedicated students, they are always looking for more to join the club.
“If people think that they like interacting with a lot of apps and technology that people interact with on a regular basis, there are lots of ways to learn it,” Smith said. “Learning it with other humans is one of the best, so maybe they should come check us out.”
The Coding Club is around halfway done with the app, and they are hoping to finish it by the end of the school year so it can be implemented for all of ELHS’s clubs to use, which is one of the most exciting factors of this project for Tristian O’Keefe (9), one of the members of the Coding Club.
“I’m excited about the coding,” O’Keefe said. “I’m excited that there’s gonna be a thing in the school that I contributed to.”
