Teaching Initiatives Bring Coding to Forefront

A couple of teaching initiatives have made headlines, with non-profit Code.org aiming to reach 10 million US students with its Hour of Code program, while General Assembly is offering free online web development courses through Dash. Code.org is aiming to celebrate this year’s Computer Science Education week (Dec. 9-15) by reaching millions of students in 50 different States of the USA, spreading the idea that “Every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn to code”. This initiative was kicked off with Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi, who fleshed out the project he and brother Ali have undertaken, gathering support from prominent personalities not only of the computer science scene, but popular culture figureheads and political figures as well. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are among those pushing Code.org’s motion, while US politicians have joined voices with the likes of Wil.i.am, Vanessa Hurst et al, to help America realize that it needs more and better computer education, in order to boost its future economy. Meanwhile, if you’re not a US student, educational institution General Assembly has launched a new online service designed to help you get immersed into the world of Web Development. Dash, a free platform available to anyone with a Twitter or email account, offers courses on CSS, HTML and Javascript. Through a series of projects, each more complex than the previous one, the user is guided into developing and expanding his skills in order to be able to handle real-life web-design problems. The platform employs a little bit of game mentality, spreading checkpoints throughout the various projects and awarding skill-points when passing each one, in order to provide extra motivation. Virtual office hours are offered, during which instructors provide users with guidance and assistance on their coding projects, while various view-screens are available, giving users the ability to see what their work results look like on different devices.