Next Week, December 8 – 18, 2014, Sees “The Hour of Code” Initiative — Get Your Girls Going With Frozen’s Anna & Elsa On The Ice.

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by Anura Guruge

Related posts:

2/ 2013 ‘Hour of Code’
3/ ‘Common Core’ & ‘Hour of Code’

++++ Search ‘programming‘ & ‘IBM‘ for other related posts >>>>

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Next week, December 8 to 11, is to 2014 “The Code Hour” week. Google, as I , kicked us off with the compelling (and appealing to kids) “The Holidays are Made With Code” note.

Alton Central School (ACS), as they also did last year, is partaking in this year’s event, though (though most likely due to various policy issues) it is an optional, after-school activity rather than something that all the kids will do, for an hour, during normal school time. C’est la vie. As an ex-professional programmer for IBM (with a B. Sc. (Hons.) in Computer Technology from the University of Wales, 1974,  & a M. Sc. (with Distinction) in Computer Science from the University of London, 1979) I am all gung-ho about any and all initiatives that will get kids INTO programming. Programming is a very satisfying and lucrative field. It was my programming skills that gave me a start in my professional life. I sometimes wish I had been content just to be a programmer and done my 30 years at IBM just as progressively more senior programmer and then retired. I would definitely would have been better off financially though would not have been anything close to eventful and exciting as it had been. I wish I had kept up with my programming. I taught programming, at postgraduate level at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), ten years ago. I taught myself Python a couple of years prior to that — and given my years of FORTRAN VI, COBOL, PL/I, PL/S, POP 2, BASIC and BAL that was a piece of cake. I regret that I never made time to learn any C (of any type) or Java. Actually a few weeks ago I spent a few minutes looking at whether I should learn C++ or C#. Not sure I can justify the time commitment. Be much better if MY kids learned to code. My son did do Python at Wheaton though he hasn’t pursued it further as yet.

I showed Teischan, 8, the Google ‘Christmas lights’ last week. Much to my delight she liked it and created quite a fancy tree. That was encouraging.

I made sure both kids are signed up, at ACS, for the Hour.

Earlier this evening I went looking around seeing what they had that kids could do on the Web prior to their instructions at school. I was overjoyed to see the Frozen Elsa project. Called Teischan over. They had a video. We watched it. It showed you what you could do. She was interested. I set her up, even registered her, on her Toshiba laptop. I told her she could take the laptop to bed and do a few programs. The last I saw she was already on #3. Cracked me up. When I was growing up we didn’t have laptops let alone PCs. But in the early 1970s I started keeping a notepad a pencil by my bed so that I could write code, that came to me via inspiration, when I was in bed — and in those I was noted for spending a lot of time in bed, though only a small part of that was for sleep.

I am GLAD that they did Frozen. That was inspired. Frozen definitely is THE flavor the year of 2014 — at least among girls. Just they have Angry Birds etc. So boys do have an equivalent though it would have been real neat if they had done Disney’s “Planes“.