Slashdot Mirror


White House Touts Obama's 1-Liner as 2014 Tech Highlight

theodp (442580) writes That President Obama became the first President to write a line of code (as a top Microsoft lobbyist looked on) is #1 on the White House's Top 9 science and technology highlights from 2014. To kick off this year's Hour of Code, the President 'learned to code' by moving a Disney Princess Elsa character 100 pixels on a screen, first by dragging-and-dropping Blockly puzzle pieces and then by coding 1 line of JavaScript. Interestingly, Bill Clinton might have been The First President To Write Code had Microsoft seen fit to use its patented, circa-1995 Graphical Programming System and Method for Enabling a Person to Learn Text-Based Programming — which describes how kids as young as 8-12 years of age can be taught to program by progressing from creating a program using graphical objects to doing so using text-based programming — to teach President Clinton to code some 20 years ago!

2 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Summary is misleading by bondsbw · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is not a Top 9 science and technology highlights from 2014, as curated by the White House. This is a Top 9 science and technology highlights that happened at the White House.

    Big difference.

    --
    All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
  2. Re:Turtle art by greg1104 · · Score: 3, Informative

    He could have worked with Dick Pick and written it in Microdata's S-BASIC.