The Skyline Coding club, started 2 years ago, is a computer programming club at Skyline High School. Luca DalCanto, the president of Skyline coding club, explained, “The coding club is a community of students at Skyline who are interested in the computer-science profession or coding as a hobby and they either want to learn more about coding without taking the programming classes here at Skyline or they are interested in getting help or feedback in projects and collaborating. It’s also a way for Skyline students to help create projects for other people in school, in other clubs and classes.”
The coding club occasionally gets requests for projects to work on for other people. “Mr. Lott has a stock-trading game and he asked us to make an AI that can play the stock-trading game, so we can compare that to students,” said DalCanto as an example of how they create projects to help others at Skyline. They have worked on projects like the Stock-trading-bot, and the Discord-meeting-bot.
The Skyline coding club meets every Tuesday after school at Mr. Kapptie’s room, room 303. In the coding club, most meetings start by breaking into groups: a group of people who learn a program language—the most popular one is Python—and a group that is going to work together to do things that other entities within the school have asked for. “Every meeting will be kind of flexible,” DalCanto added. When asked what is the best part of being in a coding club, DalCanto said, “The best part of being in the coding club is probably the inspiration I get to work on things because I know that they’re a lot of people there that help me and support me no matter what. So at any moment I can send a message to a bunch of people who really are good at coding or ask them during meetings and they’re gonna help me figure out what I wanna do and that’s kind of inspired me to make progress on projects, work on projects and stuff like that.”
Sophomore William Silver said he feels good that he has learned more about programming and is able to teach other people as well. He said the best part of being in the coding club is, “Being around a lot of open-minded people and so just being able to explain those to people who are interested.” He wants everyone to know that if he can learn to code, anyone can.
Skyline Senior Dallin Soukup explained that he wanted to join Coding club because he already knew a bit about coding. “I took a class of it, I knew the JAVA programming language, but there you have specific assignments. Whereas in the club, you could work on whatever project you want. I wanted a date of time designated to work on coding and whatever field I wanted.” Soukup thinks Skyline coding club is a great place to start learning coding. He thinks the Skyline coding club is very free and he is able to work on whatever he wants with people who are available to help him. He said, “I think the best part is that there are other people available to help you and are really passionate about helping others, and attain coding skills.”
The Skyline coding club is welcoming everyone from every level and background who is interested in coding or programming to join. DalCanto said, “I think it’s important that [beginners] know that the coding club wants to welcome everyone and we’re really supportive of people with different backgrounds.” They are trying to increase the different diversity of the people that come to the club. DalCanto said, “It was started 2 years ago and it’s been pretty small—but it’s definitely growing and we wanted to make sure it’s growing in the right direction, and in an inclusive direction.” Soukup also added, “I think if you are interested at all in coding or programming, it’s a great resource with not really much obligations, you can just go there and work on whatever you want, and there’s a lot of help available to you that you wouldn’t have in a classroom full of students.”
