By Eishna Ranganathan
News Editor

Computer Science has been offered at Neshaminy for decades, but the thought of making a club out of the subject was an idea sparked by Justin Willis, a senior at Neshaminy High School, who wanted to create a game with his friends after school.

Denise Kirk is the advisor of the club and the teacher of the school’s only AP Computer Science class, which runs during second period with only 16 kids enrolled. The class has not run in over fifteen years, and the 2013-2014 school year is the first time enough demand was present to run the class. The other computer science class is a college prep class that runs first period. The AP class uses an online textbook and primarily focuses on Java.

At meetings, members use Scratch, a fundamental program used to create the foundation for video games. “The school didn’t have a Game Developing class like they had in previous years, and I thought there should be at least some recompensation, so I founded this club to explore computer science more in depth,” Willis said.

Kirk also teaches three pre-calculus classes and values the potential applications for STEM in the future. “There’s so many pre-developed programs out there to work with and the future needs people who know how to work with the behind-the-scenes portion of technology since it’s going to play a key role in careers,” Kirk said.

With the technology-oriented generation that dwells on social media, Kirk feels that very few of the people that are affiliated with, or have accounts on sites such as Instagram or Twitter have very little information on website creation and how intricately each and every link and button is set up.

“A lot goes into making a website. You need to get a server and a lot of it is logic and math. It’s a completely different language of ones and zeros, even though that’s only binary coding. It’s interesting that such complex things are really just all numbers. Numbers that only few people have access to and know the meaning behind,” sophomore P.J. Geissler said.

The club currently meets every Monday for the rest of the school year and has a very narrow base of members and hopes to expand with more publicity.

“I wanted to learn how to code. I know the logic behind it but not exactly the depths of it. This club was the only way to learn it via a classroom environment,” sophomore Kevin Faccenda said.

Neshaminy is slowly expanding its variety of extracurricular offerings and incorporating different clubs tailored to each student’s interests. Many different activities are being born due to a small interest that a student wishes to expand, and computer science is just one of the many in years to come.