With computer-related careers making up some of the hottest jobs today, some schools are seeing more students interested in technology classes to prepare themselves for their futures.
Pottsville Area High School has been offering different types of programming classes for years, but Robert Shott, a mathematics teacher at Pottsville Area, said Thursday that recently he is seeing more students interested in computer science.
"It's been increasing year after year, where the last two to three years, I probably had a total of 40 to 45 students interested in computer programming," he said.
Teaching computer programming I, computer programming II and advanced placement computer science, all honors classes, Shott said that in the past there were only five or six students in the first two classes, and only three in the AP class, but this year, there were eight in the AP class.
Shott began teaching C++ programming language at Pottsville about 2003, and the classes moved over to the Java programming language about 2005 or 2006 since that was the language used on the AP exam.
Michelle McGinty, director of guidance at Pottsville Area, said she has many students interested in computer-related careers, even if it's not in computer science.
Many students are going over to the "shop" at Schuylkill Technology Center, where they learn about computer information systems.
"That is definitely the career that is booming right now," she said.
According to the U.S. News 100 Best Jobs of 2014, software developer is the number one job.
It states that "these professionals are the brains behind your Candy Crush obsession and Android phone dependency," and software engineers might be applications developers who design computer software, databases and games, or they could be systems-focused developers, who are responsible for building operating systems.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts there will be nearly 140,000 brand-new positions created before 2022.
Glassdoor, a database of anonymously posted information about salaries, interviews and jobs, also recently stated that these technology jobs are among the highest paying, even for interns.
Three top employers, all technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area, are even paying their interns more than the median household income in the U.S.
Palantir Technologies pays its interns an average monthly base pay of $7,012, VMWare, an average of $6,966 per month, and Twitter, an average monthly pay of $6,791.
Shott said that the computer programming classes at Pottsville are split into three courses, with computer programming I going through the first six chapters of the textbook and ending with "loops," sequences of instructions that are continually repeated until a certain condition is reached, then the second course continues on, programming in a different style and covering other topics.
There are also big projects in the fourth marking period in the second course, such as with an IRA account.
The students need to ask the user questions such as what age they start investing, how much they are going to invest, how many years, what the interest rate is and what age they are going to collect their investment, then the program they create computes the data and outputs the results.
The AP class, which takes place the entire next year after the first two classes, reviews all that they learned in computer programming I and II in preparation for the exam.
"The kids seem to like it," Shott said. "They're not used to working that hard sometimes because a lot of times you have better students that things usually come easy to them."
Shott mentioned that in computer programming, problems need to be solved twice, the first time is figuring out how to solve it, then the second time is how to write the code on the computer.
While every year there are different kinds of students, Shott has even had some that knew more than he did and recalled one student, who went on to major in computer science, that he saw playing a game in class he had created himself.
"I have two or three this year that are going to take computers (in college)," he said.
Two senior students, Rachel Shields and Luke Vuksta, both of Pottsville, are currently taking the AP class at Pottsville and became interested in coding, or writing code, last school year.
"I guess I got interested in it last year when I decided to take the class because I always was interested in computers, but I didn't really know about them, other than the basics," Vuksta said. "I decided to take the computer programming I and II classes, and I really like coding."
Vuksta plans to double major in computer science and mathematics at Bloomsburg University.
"I really like math, so I took them," Shields said. "Originally I hated it, but once I started to figure it out, I started to really like it and I'm going to major in computer science in college."
Vuksta and Shields are two of eight students in the AP class and said that they had to petition for the class since it was dropped off the course selection in the past when there wasn't enough student interest.
Twelve students signed the petition and it was reinstated, but only eight got into the class.
They now take it as an independent study, and Shott meets with them once or twice a week.
McGinty said Thursday that the computer programming and other computer-related classes, such as those focusing on Microsoft Office, data entry and desktop publishing, are not mandatory, but electives.
She would like to see students having some type of mandatory computer classes, since she said they may know what Microsoft and Apple are, as well as how to use computers, but "they might not know how to use them properly and that includes the programming, as well."
"We try to encourage the students to select those because you don't have the time to learn everything once you're off in college," she said. "You need to use those to get your work done."