Join the global ‘Hour of Code’ in December
The non-profit, Code.org is partnering with Computer Science Education week to lead a massive effort to raise awareness around computer science education this December. Code.org is leading an event called ‘Hour of Code’ with an impressive goal of getting 10 Million students to learn to code (for at least one hour) during the week of December 9-15. As of this posting, they have signed up nearly 3 Million students to learn to code for at least one hour in December.
Code.org has provided a learning portal for interested technical volunteers, classroom teachers and students to sign up. They also are providing a series of courseware that participants can select for their own ‘hour of code’. There are a number of education partners on this page.
Among the education partners selected to provide courseware by Code.org is my own non-profit “Teaching Kids Programming” (part of the MONA Foundation). Here are the resources we suggest using for ‘Hour of Code’. They include a one-hour lesson for kids ages 10+ (to learn C#, Java or SmallBasic). There are resources on the Code.org site for kids as young as 7. Also I wrote a new lesson, designed for high-school aged kids, to get a start in area of data science. Here’s the link for this data science lesson.
The goal of the exercise (and the Hour of Code as a whole) is to excite students about programming and, even more broadly, to feed the pipeline for next generation. I’d love to see the Southern California technical community take the lead globally in volunteering and teaching thousands or even tens of thousands of local kids to code this December.
