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They have to bribe people to get them interested in what they're offering?

Apparently offering it (Hour of Code) for free wasn't working, even after they got President Obama to promote the project.

Congratulations, you've just describe "Hour of code"

https://hourofcode.com/us/lear...

Many of the various tutorials are actually "Turtle graphics"

Basically, Turtle graphics by dragging and dropping blocks of code.

https://hourofcode.com/frzn

Note that section 4 of the above starts teaching about the usefulness of loops.

Not that it has anything to do with the Minecraft lessons being designated a signature Hour of Code tutorial, at least according to the evaluation criteria below, but Code.org's biggest donors coincidentally include Microsoft ($3M+), Ballmer Family Giving ($3M+), and Bill Gates ($1M+). And Code.org's CEO, who once reported to Satya Nadella, is coincidentally a sometimes jogging partner of Steve Ballmer, as well as the next-door neighbor of Microsoft President and Code.org Board member Brad Smith.

Hour of Code: How tutorials will be evaluated for inclusion:
Tutorials will be listed higher if they are:
high quality
designed for beginners - among students AND teachers
designed as a ~ 1 hour activity
require no sign up
require no payment
require no installation
work across many OS/device platforms, including mobile and tablets
work across multiple languages
promote learning by all demographic groups (esp. under-represented groups)
not pure HTML+CSS web design focus - (our goal is computer science, not just HTML coding)

Hey, back in the day you could buy votes for a drink! Perhaps more effective than the $10 prizes though, is the $500,000 in prizes Code.org dangles to entice schools to get with the program(ming), or (in the past), the $750 gift codes Code.org offered to teachers who got their students to code (with $250 more for teachers of girls).

My 9-yr old did the Hour of Code series. Good stuff and he got the concepts. It's drag and drop, so he never was at the keyboard doing it "by hand", but it's a great introduction.

In live programming an attempt is made to reduce the time between a program change and the ability to wittness consequences of this change. In the good old days, with punched cards, this was not a pretty picture as it could take a long time to get to that point. With Conversational Programming, which is a special kind of live programming, we try to go one step further and compute of the program you are writing. A simple version of Conversational Programming has been added to AgentCubes online. You can play with this as part of one of the hour of code tutorials: http://hourofcode.com/ac

how about trying the University of Colorado Hour of Code activity instead to allowing them to create any program and not just a fill in the blank coding exercise? http://hourofcode.com/ac