Hour of Code 2015!
Great Ideas, (Finally) Backed By Action
Take a moment and try to remember a time when you said, “That is a great idea!” but it took you a long while to finally get on board with it. Come on, take a moment now…
Maybe it was parking your car in the garage. Or finally getting a house with a garage. Or finally getting the junk out of your garage so you could park your car in it. At least for winter. But on a greater magnitude than that.
a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries
Well, that’s Hour of Code around E-g. What is “Hour of Code?” Well, check out the Hour of Code website for starters. If you don’t want to follow a link right now, let me help you: “The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. Anyone, anywhere can organize an Hour of Code event. One-hour tutorials are available in over 40 languages. No experience needed. Ages 4 to 104.”
There are almost 200,000 Hour of Code events around the world! Take another moment to let that sink in.
This is simply a great idea. And we’ve known about it for awhile, but we haven’t hosted an official “Hour of Code” event – until today!
There are many great options out there providing lesson plans. And there are many great learning platforms to choose from. Scratch is a favorite of many (including several E-gineers here). Some of our younger children have been going through Minecraft– and StarWars-themed learning programs from Code.org.
But today we used the Hour of Drawing with Code lesson plan from Khan Academy. Randy Cox led several young people, and quite a few non-young people, in the lesson at E-g today. Using a Javascript-like language, we built smiling faces, faces that resembled the LOL Troll, snowmen, and snowmen melting in the heat of a summer day. It was a good hour (or so) of coding.
In short, it was a good day. Maybe today we were able to reach one of the younger folks in a way that would inspire them to, or at least equip them for, a career as enjoyable for them as ours is to us here at E-g. Regardless, we were able to live out a Community Life value today by sharing our passion for coding with some younger folks.
And we’re expecting more like this to come in the next month or so. Stay tuned.