A very exciting concept launched by code.org, and it speaks to something that i’ve been talking about quite a bit for the last year. Ever convinced of the widening gap in education as far as Digital is concerned (I wrote about this topic as far back as June 2013 following a presentation at a conference here) and this new event is really gaining some momentum. The thing is, we need to push for more education among the next generation. While there are certainly some great coders coming out, and some really innovative thinking, we need for more people to really bridge the digital gap. This should not stop until computer science is regarded as important as any other major subject like english, maths and history.
The Hour of Code is looming and students globally are jumping in to this to learn to code for an hour. There is some great support growing from the big ones such as Apple and Microsoft and jump in to some basic tutorials to see if they can learn some basic code writing.
The video is below, however by way of introduction, the Hour Of Code seeks to take a group of younger people to get them involved in coding through a range of tutorials from beginner levels through to some of the mroe advanced ones. I’ll be running three of these during the week with different groups so will be looking forward to the outcomes of these.
The worldwide coverage was phenomenal with widespread engagement all over the world. While this is certainly encouraging, it can be a worry that this is seen as a one off event and this type of education should be ongoing all year around. Organisations should get behind this more because getting involved in education is not just an investment in future developers and people to be able to understand how digital development works, an organisation can gain a lot from the experience. New ways of thinking, new ideas and innovations can be derrived from the experience and there would be even money bets that the ‘tutors’ or those guiding the students through the experience would be learning a lot themselves.
If you are interested, there is a lot to learn over at the hour of code site, and there is some serious amount of fun to be had. #hourofcode