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Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Makes Game For Third Annual Hour of Code (gamasutra.com)
Eloking writes: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Twitter account lit up today with a message all too familiar to many indie devs: Mr. Trudeau has made a video game, and he'd like everyone to play it. It was a cute bit of promotion for Hour of Code, the computer science education event masterminded every year by the Code.org nonprofit. While the Hour of Code websites hosts one-hour tutorials (in 45 languages) for coding all sorts of simple applications, game developers may appreciate that the lion's share appears to be game projects, like the one Trudeau modified into a sort of hockey-themed Breakout variant.
I think that what's the most important here is not how simple or complex coding actually is; but rather getting people to know what it is, and not to fear it.
.ini files for some game configurations. Then I changed the .bat launchers a bit (in order to load different config files, for example). And increasingly complex, to the Linux kernel and beyond. And in my experience, the same is true for pretty much any field I am interested in (as well as the others).
I often meet people (students, most of the time), that are frightened by the idea of creating a project bigger than a couple of C files. The trick in this case is to progressively increase the size or the complexity of the projects they are working on, developing their abstraction, design, and overview skills (as well as testing, documentation, etc.). But, of course, you have to start somewhere. And those projects are a perfect opportunity to do so.
I believe that I more or less started coding the day I started changing
To reuse your example, say, Lego cars, can probably (indirectly, as a starter) bring someone into mechanical engineering.
I won't argue that this hour of code stuff isn't a frivolous waste of time, but I do have to say that Trudeau has a couple hundred thousand employees plus an entire Cabinet of supposedly competent politicians who's collective job is to sort that stuff out and generally keep things running.
If the PM is so critical that all that it all falls apart should he divert his attention elsewhere for a few hours, then we're fucked.
Log in or piss off.
Word of warning to non-Canadians who don't recognise the hyperbole: Alberta is a strange land that desperately wants to be Texas. Its politics produce strange ideas like this. It's clearly something in the water that does this, you see people move there from elsewhere in Canada, and it takes them months sometimes years to become normal again when they come back home. What your experiencing here is someone who has been brainwashed and is suffering a level of butthurt as a result of having a Liberal mayor in Calgary, Socialist government at the provincial level, and a Liberal federal government. Its spectacular to watch.
Carry on Mashiki. Tell us more about how the last decade of Conservative incompetence didn't create this housing bubble and the current economic instability.
This is probably the most professionally experienced and accomplished cabinet we've ever had. We have a doctor as health minister, a climate change researcher as environment minster, a former Olympian as minister of sport (granted its a BS ministry, but a good example of this pattern). This isn't to say they'll do a good job, but saying they're unskilled is nonsense.
Its even more striking to compare this bunch to the Harper gang. His ministers were chosen for being toadies and yes men. What was Joe Oliver's particular expertise? Chris Alexander? Paul Calandra? Maxime Bernier? The current leadership race is such a farce as no one knew what they were doing with Boss Harper gone.
The map is not the territory.