Hour of Code
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Code.org is a non-profit organization and eponymous website led by Hadi and
Ali Partovi Ali Partovi ( fa, علی پرتووی; born 1972) is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known as a co-founder of Code.org (which he founded with his twin brother Hadi), iLike, LinkExchange, an early advisor at Dropbo ...
that aims to encourage people, particularly school students in the
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
, to learn
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
. The website includes free coding lessons, sounds, and many more things used to help students code fluently. The initiative also targets schools in an attempt to encourage them to include more computer science classes in the curriculum. On December 9, 2013, they launched the Hour of Code nationwide to promote computer science during Computer Science Education Week through December 15, 2013.


History

Code.org was launched in January 2013 by Iranian-American brothers Hadi Partovi and
Ali Partovi Ali Partovi ( fa, علی پرتووی; born 1972) is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known as a co-founder of Code.org (which he founded with his twin brother Hadi), iLike, LinkExchange, an early advisor at Dropbo ...
, as a non-profit focused on making computer programming more accessible. The initial focus was on creating a database of all computer science classrooms in the United States. At the time, Hadi Partovi stated that about ninety percent of US schools do not teach programming, despite it now being a "foundational field". The idea for the organization came from Hadi, who states that he thought of it on the day of
Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a ...
' death in 2011 while mulling over his own potential legacy. After this, Hadi began working full-time in attempt to further grow the platform and organization. In late February 2013, a month after launch, they released a video featuring
Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), o ...
,
Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...
,
Jack Dorsey Jack Patrick Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American Internet entrepreneur and programmer who is a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Inc., as well as a co-founder and the CEO and chairperson of Block, Inc., the developer of the Squar ...
, and other programmers and entrepreneurs on the importance of learning how to code. Two weeks after the launch, ''
TechCrunch TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately ...
'' reported that the video had gone viral and received a lot of positive attention. Partovi raised about $10 million for Code.org from various tech companies and tech company founders. In 2014, Code.org posted a one-hour tutorial to build and customize a ''
Flappy Bird ''Flappy Bird'' is a mobile game developed by the Vietnamese video game artist and programmer Dong Nguyen ( vi, Nguyễn Hà Đông), under his game development company .Gears. The game is a side-scroller where the player controls a bird, attemp ...
'' video game using the site's block visual programming language. Code.org has also created coding programs revolving around characters from the Disney film '' Frozen'', in addition to ''
Angry Birds ''Angry Birds'' is a Finnish action-based media franchise created by Rovio Entertainment. The game series focuses on the eponymous flock of angry birds who try to save their eggs from green-colored pigs. Inspired by the game ''Crush the Castle ...
'', and ''
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''. In December 2014, Code.org held a successful Indiegogo
crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...
campaign that raised over $5 million to help educate school children. Overall, about 100 million students have been reached by Code.org efforts. On November 16, 2015,
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
announced a partnership with Code.org to launch ''
Minecraft ''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being ...
'' as a tutorial to teach kids how to code. In February 2016, Code.org won the award for "Biggest Social Impact" at the Annual
Crunchies The Crunchies was an industry award given out from 2007 to 2017 by several technology blogs to the Silicon Valley companies and venture capitalists they cover. The awards have been sponsored and co-hosted by blogs such as GigaOm, TechCrunch, Vent ...
Awards. In December 2016, Code.org rang the opening bell of the
NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...
. In March 2017, Code.org began extending its work to the region of
Rajasthan Rajasthan (; lit. 'Land of Kings') is a state in northern India. It covers or 10.4 per cent of India's total geographical area. It is the largest Indian state by area and the seventh largest by population. It is on India's northwestern si ...
, India.


Hour of Code

During Computer Science Education Week from December 9 to December 15, 2013, Code.org launched the "Hour of Code Challenge" on its website to teach
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
to school students, enticing them to complete short programming
tutorial A tutorial, in education, is a method of transferring knowledge and may be used as a part of a learning process. More interactive and specific than a book or a lecture, a tutorial seeks to teach by example and supply the information to complete ...
s. The Hour of Code involved getting people to write short snippets of code to achieve pre-specified goals using
Blockly Blockly is a client-side library for the programming language JavaScript for creating block-based visual programming languages (VPLs) and editors. A project of Google, it is free and open-source software released under the Apache License 2.0. It ...
, a
visual programming language In computing, a visual programming language (visual programming system, VPL, or, VPS) is any programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements ''graphically'' rather than by specifying them ''textually''. A VP ...
of a similar flavor as
Logo A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wordma ...
. The initiative had been announced about two months in advance and at the time of launch, the initiative was supported by then United States President
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
as well as executives from technology companies such as
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
and
Apple Inc Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
. It was also supported by educational online learning platforms such as
Khan Academy Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization created in 2008 by Sal Khan. Its goal is creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of videos. Its website also in ...
. About 20 million people participated and over 600 million lines of code had been written. The Hour of Code also offered participation gifts to some of the schools involved, such as a set of fifty laptops or a conference call with one a tech "luminary" like Gates or Dorsey. The crowdfunding effort for Hour of Code received the highest amount of funding ever raised on Indiegogo. By October 2014, about forty million students had taken the Hour of Code class, and a second Hour of Code was held in December 2014. That year, locations for Hour of Code lessons included Apple retail stores. In December 2016, Canadian Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau Justin Pierre James Trudeau ( , ; born December 25, 1971) is a Canadian politician who is the 23rd and current prime minister of Canada. He has served as the prime minister of Canada since 2015 and as the leader of the Liberal Party since 2 ...
helped launch the international Hour of Code campaign for 2016. And in December 2017, Code.org announced that Hour of Code had reached over 500 million hours served.


Curriculum efforts

The first step in the organization's efforts as regards the curriculum of schools was to work with US school districts to add computer programming as a class. Most US schools did not have a course code for computer sciences, in order for schools to be able to offer coding as a class. After this, the next step was to create free online teaching and learning materials for schools to use if instituting computer science classes. By 2014, Code.org had launched computer courses in thirty US school districts to reach about 5% of all the students in US public schools (about two million students), and by 2015, Code.org had trained about 15,000 teachers to teach computer sciences, able to reach about 600,000 new students previously unable to learn computer coding, with large percentages of those being either female or minorities. To date, Code.org has prepared over 72,000 educators to teach computer science. That year Code.org was partnered with about seventy of the largest US school districts (including each of the seven largest), representing several million students. The company also partnered with other computer class businesses and private entities to provide additional computer learning materials and opportunities. As of 2015, six million students had been enrolled in Code.org curriculum classes. That year, Code.org partnered with College Board, in order to develop a slate of advanced placement computer classes. The main platform used in Code.org instruction is Code Studio which according to TechCrunch, "teaches the underlying concepts in programming through the manipulation of blocks of logic that when stacked together in a particular order, move a character around a scene or draw a shape." In 2018, Code.org celebrated record participation by girls and underrepresented minorities in AP computer science classrooms, driven in large part by students in the Code.or
CS Principles
classrooms.


Legislative efforts

One of the main lobbying efforts of Code.org in state legislatures is to ensure that computer classes are not registered as foreign language classes, but as science classes, in order to ensure that more than coding is taught in computer courses. Code.org also focuses specifically on female and minority students, as the organization believes these are the students most at risk of not receiving computer science education before high school or college.


Goals

According to its website, Code.org has the following goals: * Bringing Computer Science classes to every
K–12 K–12, from kindergarten to 12th grade, is an American English expression that indicates the range of years of publicly supported primary and secondary education found in the United States, which is similar to publicly supported school grade ...
school in the United States, especially in urban and rural neighborhoods. * Demonstrating the successful use of online curriculum in public school classrooms * Changing policies in all 50 states to categorize C.S. as part of the math/science "core" curriculum * Harnessing the collective power of the tech community to celebrate and grow C.S. education worldwide * Increasing the representation of women and students of color in the field of Computer Science. * Increasing their global outreach by making their courses available in more than 45 languages that are used in over 180 countries.


Reception

Writing for ''
San Jose Mercury News ''The Mercury News'' (formerly ''San Jose Mercury News'', often locally known as ''The Merc'') is a morning daily newspaper published in San Jose, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is published by the Bay Area News Group, a subsidiar ...
'', Mike Cassidy praised Code.org and the Hour of Code, writing: "A publicity stunt is what we need." John Dvorak was critical of the Hour of Code in an article for ''
PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and have continued to the present d ...
''. Dvorak wrote: "I see it as a ploy to sell more computers in schools."


See also

*
Codecademy Codecademy is an American online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in 12 different programming languages including Python, Java, Go, JavaScript, Ruby, SQL, C++, C#, and Swift, as well as markup languages HTML and CSS. The ...
* CodeCombat * CodeHS *
Coursera Coursera Inc. () is a U.S.-based massive open online course provider founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Coursera works with universities and other organizations to offer online courses, ...
* edX *
Khan Academy Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization created in 2008 by Sal Khan. Its goal is creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of videos. Its website also in ...
* Livecoding.tv * LinkedIn Learning *
Scratch (programming language) Scratch is a high-level block-based visual programming language and website aimed primarily at children as an educational tool for programming, with a target audience of ages 8 to 16. Users on the site, called Scratchers, can create projects ...
*
Udacity Udacity, Inc. is an American for-profit educational organization founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky offering massive open online courses. According to Thrun, the origin of the name Udacity comes from the company's desi ...
*
Treehouse (company) Treehouse or (Teamtreehouse) is an online technology school that offers beginner to advanced courses in web design, web development, mobile development and game development. Its courses are aimed at beginners looking to learn computer coding skil ...
*
Tynker Tynker is an educational programming platform to help children learn coding skills, including game design, web design, animation and robotics. It includes courses in Minecraft Modding, Minecraft Game Design, Creative Coding, Python and CSS. Tynker ...
*
W3Schools W3Schools is a freemium educational website for learning coding online. Initially released in 1998, it derives its name from the World Wide Web but is not affiliated with the W3 Consortium. W3Schools offers courses covering all aspects of web de ...


References


External links

* * {{url, https://hourofcode.com/ Programming games Non-profit organizations based in Seattle American educational websites Education companies established in 2013 2013 establishments in Washington (state) 501(c)(3) organizations Hadi Partovi