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Code.org Stats: 507MM LOC, 6.8MM Kids, 2K YouTube Views
theodp writes "On the final day of Computer Science Education Week, the Hour of Code bravado continues. Around 12:30 a.m. Sunday (ET), Code.org was boasting that in just 6 days, students of its tutorials have "written" more than 10x the number of lines of code in Microsoft Windows. "Students of the Code.org tutorials have written 507,152,775 lines of code. Is this a lot? By comparison, the Microsoft Windows operating system has roughly 50 million lines of code." Code.org adds, "In total, 15,481,846 students have participated in the Hour of Code. Of this group, 6,872,757 of them used the tutorials by Code.org, and within the Code.org tutorial, they've written 507,152,775 lines of code." On YouTube, however, a playlist of the Code.org tutorial videos has distinctly lower numbers, with only 2,246 views of the Code.org Wrap Up video reported as of this writing. So, any thoughts on why the big disconnect, and how close the stats might reflect reality? Code.org does explain that an 'Hour of Code' is not necessarily an 'hour of code' ("Not everybody finishes an Hour of Code tutorial. Some students spend one hour. Some spend 10 minutes. Some spend days. Instead of counting how many students 'finish one hour'; or how much time they spent, this [LOC] is our simplest measure of progress"). So, with millions being spent on efforts to get Code.org into the nation's schools — New York and Chicago have already committed their 1.5 million K-12 students — is it important to get a better understanding of what the Hour of Code usage stats actually represent — and what their limitations might be — and not just accept as gospel reports like AllThingsD's 15 Million Students Learned to Program This Week, Thanks to Hour of Code ("every other school family in the U.S. has a child that has done the Hour of Code")?"
500 million (or whatever) lines of code worth of "hello world" is not exactly the same as a working, profitable commercial OS family, is it?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
According to my MBA, it says we're done. Print it and ship it!
Simple metrics are usually useless.
I ran through some of the lessons to see what it was about and I'm a developer. I expect that is a pretty common occurrence for this type of site.
Again, this isn't a bad thing, but getting somebody to bash out 30-odd lines doesn't make them a programmer, or even given them a taste a programming. That's enough for maybe some basic flow control.
At least 50% of the kids who came to my HoC event didn't want to be there and were forced to come by a parent/sibling/teacher/other. 100% of them engaged for an entire HoC activity and most stayed beyond an hour. That's success in my book.
I don't actually give a damn if it's considered hype/bullshit/grandstanding...it's input into the kids' perspectives and experiences. Nothing bad will come from it and we may just get something good out of it
Being forced to study a subject like this very rarely piques any true interest in it. Of those students, the ones who were actually new to programming most likely dislike it much more now. Those who were already somewhat familiar with it, or who were interested enough to investigate it on their own, are no better off.
This holds true for any subject that is forced upon students. This includes playing musical instruments, drama, dancing, art, chemistry, calculus, welding, and auto mechanics.
While it may be desirable to have "well-rounded" students, forcing them all to learn a small, useless-in-practice amount of knowledge in a large number of areas is a recipe for failure. All you end up with are a bunch of people who know that there are a lot of fields they immensely dislike, while at the same time having squandered time that could've been used to improve their abilities and knowledge in those they do truly understand and like.
"Students of the Code.org tutorials have written 507,152,775 lines of code.
So *that's* how they fixed the ACA website. ;-)
With a perl one-liner.
Students of the Code.org tutorials have written 507,152,775 lines of code.
"...which will now be used as the coding base for Windows 9."
"So, with millions being spent on efforts to get Code.org into the nation's schools"
That's why the numbers don't match.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I was a hiring manager back in 1998-2000, and on occasion I still have to interview people today for programming positions.
You wouldn't believe how little experience some people will consider "sufficient" these days. It's worse for some positions, mainly those involving Ruby, and also those involving JavaScript.
I routinely get applicants who list themselves as having experience with both, yet in phone interviews or in person we quickly find out that they literally had written less than 100 lines of code in those languages. I've even had several self-proclaimed Ruby on Rails programmers say their experience is based solely on having read that weird-as-fuck whythehappystuff's "Ruby Guide for Baristas" (or whatever his name is and whatever his e-book is actually called), without having actually done any coding. And they're out there applying for jobs in industry!
It's much like it was in the late 1990s, except at least then it was understandable that some people may not have had experience with the latest technologies, given how new they were, and how fast things are moving. But there's no excuse today. These types of initiatives may even make the situation worse, by making highly-unqualified individuals mistakenly think they are far more adept than they actually are, to the point of wasting the time and effort of those of us in industry, even if it just filtering out their horrid resumes and job applications by the tens of thousands.
I would be far more impressed if the schools spent time teaching engineering fundamentals, hard sciences, and critical thinking. Programming is just a tool to express the previous three. or you are just a web monkey and maybe that's okay.. but to further our educational goals and impact the economy and the future of the US technical base, we should be focused on engineering, not programming.
It's to convince people to remove it.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
However not everybody needs to be a coder.
Also the essence of worth expressed instead of LOC can better be expressed by the following equation:
Worth = LOC / TAB * TAC * RCEF * PI() * e() * cos(90)
LOC: Lines of code
TAB: Tasks achivable
TAC: Tasks achieved
RCEF: Relative Computing Effieciency Factor
pppppps. ;)
Irony as in steel
I mean I haven't used it since 2002 or something, and it wasn't that great at that time: lots of BSOD, and programs often needed to be killed or the OS needed to be rebooted. Didn't MS Windows improve since ?
I personally ran this last week with almost 200 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, and will be doing it Monday and Tuesday to make up for snow days last week.
First, because their lab time is an hour and we also did a warm up and closing lecture, most kids didn't get to all 20 exercises in the first blockly set - we had perhaps 15 kids get all the way through it. Second, Most of the kids weren't patient enough to watch *any* of the videos, clicking through them to get to the next exercise. The dude from NASA in that last video talks for a while about the problem they just solved - it took about 7 seconds for the kids to get bored hearing about what they just solved, and they wanted to jump to the part where they could get their certificate at the end.
In my kids' school I had to prearrange to unblock access to all of this stuff as well. I'm sure there are plenty of schools that unblocked code.org, but not YouTube... so they could do the exercises but not watch videos.
While I could go and grab 507 millions lines of gibberish code, wouldn't it make more sense to just go with Microsoft Windows?
I don't quite see what the point of this article is. Oh wait, did black people write the code? Is that what makes it better than Windows?
Php is a computer language??
SLOC is not a good measurement of productivity. I'd like to thank this submission for illustrating why. How many of the things written during this consisted of code not totally unlike things I wrote in my exploratory youth?
10 PRINT "FUCK YOU, I DO WHAT I WANT"
20 PRINT "SADDAM WAS HERE"
30 GOTO 10
I am 32 and have been coding for 20 years, mostly as a hobby but a short stint working in an IT apps department, and some coding for other work related things. It was 20 years ago when I was around 12 years old I got the itch to want to code. My father (who is a P. Eng) bought a computer in the mid 80's (it was a Compaq Deskpro 8086) when almost nobody had one. I started using it from a very early age, mostly for games, etc.
I started to notice my father would spend many hours working on something so I started asking him what he was doing. Being the type to turn everything into a teaching moment, he would explain that he was programming in Pascal. I thought it was cool that he could create programs, but didn't think much about it until a few years later when he bought a new PC. I saw him coding in QuickBasic 4.5 where he could program with graphics and compile to an EXE. I started asking more and more questions until he started to let me try it out. Soon I was hooked and learned all the basics and advanced stuff of QB, eventually moved on the Visual Basic, some assembly, and eventually into more modern stuff. Now I code in C#, C, C++, Javascript, PHP, and others and love it.
The point being, all those years ago my father inspired me and got me interested in coding at such a pivotal age. I have taken those skills and interests and applied them to many areas of my life even though I do not code for a career. The whole idea of Code.Org is to inspire and get kids interested in it. It fosters higher levels of thinking, feeling of accomplishments, and give them a purpose in life instead of just consuming things like games and mindless entertainment.
I think it's just great what they are doing, and having Gates and Zuckerburg as spokesman is also great!
Probably worth mentioning that Code.org's online programming tutorial for kids, created in 2013 with collaboration with engineers from Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Facebook, is kind of like a dumbed-down, albeit slicker, version of online instruction given to children in 1973 on the University of Illinois' PLATO computer-assisted instruction system.
Programming by Children (1973): "Young children can be taught the basic elements of programming...In Figure 7a the child has walked the man, one step at a time, through a maze."
Overview of Code.org's Hour of Code activity (2013): "Our activity is a set of 20 self-guided puzzles that teach the basics of computer science for users with no prior experience. In each puzzle, students write a program that gets a character through a maze."
And this will be the source of Windows 9 then?
I'm looking forward to it!
507mm is about 20 inches
It didnt work for me. If anything, turned me away from programming in my early life.
I'am the sort of person that needs a task, something enjoyable and a end result that makes it worth the time invested.
I remember when i was 12, i created a lottery number generator in Qbasic for my parents. I learnt everything on my own, in my own time, and enjoyed every moment of it.
When i was 26, i had a dream to create a game. I always wanted to make my own game, but, i lacked the knowledge to do so.
I found a program called 3Drad http://www.3drad.com/ . A game engine which allows you to quickly add pre-defined objects without using any code.
After a year of playing with the engine, and, my knowledge and skills expanded. I wanted to increase the AI count from 2 to 7, and, use vectors/quats + raytracing instead of physx.
To do this, i had to start coding by using the script object (anglescript). After a year of being self taught, and, following the community's tips, i re-created the whole game using just over 3k lines of code.
Heres the finished product http://www.freankexpo.net/533/tr-zero
Theres alot of features i couldnt add to the 3drad version, due to limitations with the engine.
Now, i'am 29, and currently working in a new engine with vs2008 and C++.
http://www.indiedb.com/games/tr-zero
The point of this post is to hopefully show some of you that being force fed "hello world", and, boring lessons isnt for everyone. Sometimes, you need that self initiative and drive to make something you enjoy doing.
Everyone is different, force fed lessons or not.
I hope code.org turns out "good" future programmers, ones that care about stability and performance. Hopefully get out of this "its a beta" era we live in today, instead of adding to it.
#include <inttypes.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
for (uint64_t i = 0; i < 10000000000ULL; i += 1048576) {
printf("Submission %llu: int main(int argc, char **argv) { printf(\"Hello, world!\"); }\n", i);
}
return 0;
}
I held a public parent/child Hour of Code session in my student lab and invited everyone I could think of to bring their kids. One woman was going to bring her 13 yr old daughter but the daughter had other ideas, decked mom, busted stuff, decked someone else, got hauled off to juvie, had a court appearance 2 days later and now has to wear an ankle bracelet. I had about 40 parent/child pairs who tell me they had extremely positive experiences but the one extremely negative experience is the one I'll remember :(
Is there some reason why Khan Academy never updated their Python video tutorial to use Python 3? I've always avoided it because I'd prefer not to go through a tutorial that may require me to unlearn things at the end.
There is no context for the code, or how you would actually use it outside of the GUI editor.
507MM LOC
How many MibiLOCs is that?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The main Hour of Code activity is selling programming just like Froot Loops. There is not even an attempt to make the activity interesting or creative. There is more nutrition in the card board than the food itself. Take a super boring approach to teaching computer science add cartoon characters and celebrity figures. Very sad!
apt-get install libreoffice-calc
Society is probably better off teaching kids first order logic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic
Not only will it help them sharpen their analytically skills (Making it easier for them to do, well, anything) it will also sharpen their BS-metre making them better citizens.
Schools should just teach math better, an intermediate high-school senior level maths course is much more challenging than most programming tasks. HS maths should incorporate a programming module in their algebra lessons, exposing teens to the basic control flows found in any language (and how to manipulate numbers and expressions with them) will make it easier for a student to learn a certain type of programming _if_ they need to.
I'm not impressed with these online programming classes, everything is placed in wrappers and the student just plugs things in.
Kinda strange. Look at the daily views stats and notice that the only large number of views was actually taking place on December 3: when the video was uploaded and BEFORE the actual hour of code event!