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.
On Launching a Website