This week, millions of students will once more try their hand at an Hour of Code, a project kicked off last year to introduce people of any age to computer science.
On the website detailing the Hour of Code, the statistics are incredible: Last year, more than 15 million students globally tried their hand at coding.
Hour of Code is held from Dec. 8 to Dec. 14 as part of Computer Science Education Week.
Yahoo Tech reported that numerous schools created their own Hour of Code events, while the interest in coding generated off last year’s launch brought about the birth of school coding clubs and sparked a movement to “get more kids writing code.”
The CEO of Code.org built on last year’s success by asking President Barack Obama to
kick off the event this year by writing code, Forbes reported.
Hadi Partovi wrote on Quora that many people asked about the line of code Obama wrote. He said it was a simple line: moveForward(100);
“That code is all it took to get Elsa to move 100 pixels to finish drawing a square, in a secret, un-released JavaScript version of our Code Studio tutorials featuring Anna and Elsa from Frozen. (see the block-based version of the tutorial at http://code.org/frozen),” Partovi wrote on Quora.
Yes, it was a simple code, Partovi said, but that’s what he and others in computer science wanted the Hour of Code initiative to help people understand.
“That's how computer science starts,” he said. “You don't write a fully-fledged game when you write your very first line of code, you write something as simple as PRINT ‘Hello World.’”
Partovi took 20 students to the White House to teach Obama how to code. It was a special day for those students, he wrote.
“The girl who taught the President to code (Adrianna) came from an incredibly tough neighborhood in Newark that had just had a neighborhood shooting days earlier,” he said on Quora. “One of the victims had been their former classmate, so she and all the kids were shaken up. This day was a total fairy-tale for them.”
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