In celebration of Computer Science Education Week, millions of students across the country are taking the time for the second annual Hour of Code--including President Obama, who wrote a few lines of JavaScript this morning at South Seventeenth Street School in Newark, NJ.
Organized by nonprofit Code.org, the Hour of Code initiative is supported by almost 200 partner organizations, ranging from Apple to Teach For America to the Boys & Girls Club of America. The one-hour tutorials, where students use programming blocks to complete game-like challenges featuring characters from Disney’s Frozen and Flappy Birds, are free and available for a variety of devices, including laptops, smartphones and tablets. The site also offers suggestions for how to participate in the Hour of Code without access to computers or internet.
Code.org says over 76,000 classrooms across 180 countries have committed to the Hour of Code. According to its website, more than 56 million students have participated so far, writing 3,343,764,458 lines of code. (For some perspective, the Microsoft Windows operating system boasts 50 million lines of code.)
WIth $20 million raised in 2014 (including nearly $5 million in the biggest IndieGoGo campaign in history), Code.org is spearheading one of the most publicized and well-funded initiatives to introduce computer science to schools around the world. For its promotional videos, it has enlisted plenty of Hollywood and Silicon Valley celebrities, along with Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Malala Yousafzai.
To celebrate Computer Science Education Week, a number of companies are offering online and in-person tutorials and resources for the Hour of Code. Check out one near you:
- An Hour of Java Code, from Vocareum
- Introductory Hour of Code Curriculum, from Khan Academy
- A rap video on “the Top Ten” reason to code from Flocabulary
- Apple’s App Store selection of Hour of Code tools
- Fun Hour of Code activities from Scratch, Tynker, and Kodable
