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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.
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.
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
"Students of the Code.org tutorials have written 507,152,775 lines of code.
So *that's* how they fixed the ACA website. ;-)
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.
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!
Is programming an actually useful skill for many people? Maybe. Most are not going to write code professionally.
Even if they don't, it helps to have an understanding of what a computer program is, and the kinds of problems it might solve. Programming isn't the main function of most people's jobs, but a lot of people work using a computer and would benefit from being more aware of what it can do.
For example, a colleague was manually reorganising a large set of JPG files based on their filenames. A few "mv" commands could have done 99% of the task in under a minute, but she didn't realise it was possible.
Someone else needed to do some repetitive change on thousands of rows in an Excel spreadsheet. They spent the whole morning doing it, and then grumbled about it at lunchtime, and how it would probably take another whole day. It took me less than five minutes, and she's since written some macros herself, saving time and processing data in ways she didn't find practical before.
Doing this manually is prone to errors as well. Quite a bit, actually.
The one thing that I have found IT depts. around the world to be consistently good at, is saying "no", "we can't", or "you shouldn't".
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...