Would you, could you, do an hour of code? Sam I Am had a rough time with his green breakfast, but as we know all it took was one bite to discover that he liked it. Code.org and programming professionals and educators around the country want you to try some code. We’ve combed through the offerings and these are some tutorials we recommend. Each tutorial can be completed with any computer in an hour or less.
When you’ve tried some programming please come back and leave a comment below to let everyone know what you thought.
- For an introduction, program graphics with Processing: http://hourofcode.com/pr
- For those with some experience, use Python to build a chatbot, model an epidemic, or create a game: http://hourofcode.com/gr
- Also for those with some experience, use JavaScript on Codecademy to make your name do cool stuff: http://hourofcode.com/ca
- Ready for the big time? Use ObjectiveC to build an iOS game: http://hourofcode.com/mg
Do you want to know more about The Hour of Code? Watch the longer version of the promotional video:
Why do we need more people—especially women—in computer science? See the statistics: http://code.org/stats
I’ve done several hours of code on these tutorials so I think I deserve a break. Well, I won’t get one so it’s a good thing I love doing it! Here are my observations about the above-mentioned tutorials.
My two favorite are the Processing and the iOS app. Dan Shiffman is so friendly and enthusiastic in the Processing videos and he even favorited my tweet about it (here)! And I learned A LOT in the iOS coding one.
If you do one of the three Python tutorials, they do get progressively harder, with the Chatbot being the easiest and the Tunnel game the hardest. But they are great, try all three!
The Javascript tutorial is quite short. You could do it in 15 minutes.
Please post your experiences here! I can’t wait to see what everyone thought.