ROCHESTER — Millions of students across the world are spending an hour a day this week learning how to read and write code.

About five hundred of them are at Rochester Memorial School, where the “Hour of Code,” a global computer science education program, has been taught for over a decade.

This year’s event began Monday, Dec. 9, and during the week, Rochester Memorial students — from preschool to sixth grade — are spending 60 minutes daily learning about coding.

Library teacher Sandi Sollauer has led the program for 11 years. It’s by far her favorite week to teach, she said.

“It’s such an empowering skill for these kids to have,” Sollauer said.

On the morning of Thursday, Dec. 12, fifth and sixth graders gathered in the library with laptops to create sequences of code. The lines of code programmed sprites to move on screen. Other sequences solved math problems on number lines.

“It’s definitely been fun,” fifth grader Grace Scanlon said. “We do this every year, and it’s so much fun. I love doing it.”

Sollauer said each line of code is like a small problem that students have to solve. And it’s exciting, fun and satisfying when it is solved, she said.

But, it’s better when the code doesn’t work at first, according to Sollauer. When the coding is hard, students think.

“Each time we make a mistake, it’s perfect because we just learned from that,” Sollauer said.

Enrichment teacher Scott Huckabee has also taught the Hour of Code with Sollauer for three years. Students spend part of the hour with Huckabee and part of the hour with Sollauer learning a program from each.

Sixth grader Eli Linane said the Hour of Code was a “really enjoyable experience.”

“You kind of just mess around and have fun,” Linane said.

The lines of code don’t just tell the computer what to do, according to fifth grader Katriel McCarthy. It has to tell the computer how to do it too.

“Just taking that time to figure it out is really fun,” McCarthy said.

A favorite quote of Sollauer’s — one that appears attributed to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs — is “everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think."

Sollauer agrees. She sees it when the 500 Rochester Memorial students work on code in the library this week.

“They’re all thinking,” she said.