Coding with Kids

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week

Earlier this month, Congress added computer science to the list of core academic subjects as part of an update to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that’ll be voted on soon.

This is a big deal! Here’s what it means:

With all the national debate on immigration, I recently looked at the data for all the “skilled worker” visas we grant. It turns out almost 60% of ALL “skilled worker” visas granted were for computer science occupations.  (Electric engineers, by comparison, accounted for 2%)

This lines up closely to the data about where the new “STEM” jobs are. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. It turns out over 60% of all new occupations in STEM are in computing and computer science.

With only 10% of all STEM graduates choosing to major in computer science, it’s no surprise the U.S. needs to bring in so many skilled workers from other countries! Whether you support immigration or not, one thing we can all support is that more U.S. schools should at least offer basic computer science instruction. 

Students in most high schools receive zero exposure to computer science, because their high school doesn’t even offer it as a course. Here’s a crazy idea: instead of applying the revenues from skilled worker immigration towards an “immigration STEM fund”, why not make a computer science education fund?

- Hadi Partovi, Code.org

“What did you do today?” “10% bug making and my 90% debugging.” “Didn’t you do that yesterday?” “Yeah.”

After tens of millions of students learned their first Hour of Code in December, how many have kept learning? Lots, actually!

Code.org’s online learning platform Code Studio just passed 5 million students enrolled across almost 115,000 classrooms around the world!

How filters work, explained by Instagram founder Kevin Systrom