On Saturday, hundreds of children -- and Gov. Asa Hutchinson -- spent an hour on the second floor of the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock trying to make a computer version of Elsa from the Disney film Frozen move on their computer screens by writing lines of code.
"I told a computer to have Elsa walk in a square, and she did it," Hutchinson said at a news conference later.
Saturday's computer science exercise was an effort to help promote the governor's Computer Science Initiative to get more Arkansas students to learn computer coding, thus preparing them for higher-technology and higher-paying jobs in the future.
The exercise was set up for students who attended the Head of the Class Bash at the Clinton Center, which annually provides free backpacks and school supplies for some children. AT&T Arkansas provided the money for 77 laptops for the students to do an "Hour of Code" in sessions held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday.
The Computer Science Initiative requires all Arkansas high schools and charter schools to offer computer science classes. Hutchinson has placed an emphasis on coding, and the state has been using a hashtag -- #arkidscancode -- to advance the campaign on social media.
More than 1,300 students have signed up for an online coding course being offered by the state through Virtual Arkansas. The total number of students who will learn coding in one of the 62 nonvirtual classrooms offering it won't be known until October. More than 130 teachers have been trained to teach coding, the governor has said.
On Saturday, students used the website Code.org to do coding projects using Frozen characters Anna and Elsa, or to play a game in which they used coding to move animals through mazes to their food.
They wrote lines of code that were simplified versions of JavaScript called Blockly, developed by Google for introductory programming games. Once students assembled their blocks of code, they hit "Run Program," and the results of their coding appeared -- if they got it right.
Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key, who also was on hand Saturday, said the event was a great introduction to coding for students.
Anthony Onyia, 16, who will be a junior at Little Rock Central High School this year, was trying to lead a virtual squirrel through a maze to reach an acorn. He had to do the commands in a certain number of steps, requiring some shortcuts and more complicated language.
"It seemed difficult at times, but I'm getting used to it," he said. Onyia said coding reminds him of math and he's decent at math.
Onyia isn't signed up for a computer science class next year, but he's thinking about it now.
"I've never heard of coding before, but today they actually exposed us to it, and it's pretty cool," he said. "I just like the problem-solving of it."
Many of the students learning code were younger than Onyia.
Phillip Cole, 13, and Niyana Momphrey, 11, said they weren't sure if they would be in a computer science class this year but they were enjoying themselves Saturday.
Phillip, who will be in eighth grade at Maumelle Middle School, was trying to lead an angry red bird to a green pig, a reference to the popular game Angry Birds.
"I'm having fun," he said.
Niyana, who will be in sixth grade at Henderson Middle School, said she was at the Clinton Center on Saturday for the free backpack, but after using coding to make Elsa do ice patterns on the screen, she said she thought she might do coding again sometime.
More than games, the coding initiative is about economics, business leaders said.
High-tech businesses are here, said Walter Burgess, chairman of the Arkansas STEM Coalition, but they don't always have the in-state talent pool from which to hire employees.
"It's really about economic development," he said.
"STEM" stands for science, technology, engineering and math, and is an acronym commonly used to describe fields of study that are increasingly in demand.
Computer science and coding skills are needed not only by high-tech companies, said Ed Drilling, president of AT&T Arkansas.
"There's a place for those kinds of jobs in every industry," he said. "It's going to be such a significant portion of any job."
Hutchinson said that in addition to employers, the students themselves are demanding computer skills.
"They want computer science," he said, referring to Saturday's crowd. "They want access to technology."
Metro on 08/16/2015