In celebration of Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 9-15), code.org sponsored an “Hour of Code” to introduce kids to programming. The site is well-developed with materials for teachers, videos of famous people talking about the importance of coding, how to promote computer science, and of course, many games that would appeal to kids. As a big kid, I picked Angry Birds/Plants vs Zombies for my hour of code. I guided a bird through a maze towards a pig and then a zombie to a sunflower.
As you can see from the screenshot, the purpose of the game is to arrange blocks together to perform a task. Each block represents one line of code (in Javascript). With 20 puzzles, each level gets a little more challenging with more complicated combinations of instructions. Essentially, the designers are game-ifying the teaching of control flow thinking.
I checked the site today and 19,457,911 students have written 648,644,576 lines of code.
The growing gap between the number of tech jobs and the number of computer science students underlines the importance of efforts to encourage more people to consider technology as a career.
