#codenow

My 12-year-old is soooo glad she downloaded Flappy Bird last week. That’s because this week, Dong Nguyen, the popular game’s developer, took it offline.

More than 50 million people already had downloaded the game, and a series of tweets suggested Nguyen wasn’t comfortable wit the success and the attention it had received. So good luck finding it if you hadn’t gotten it already — unless you want to bid on smartphones with the app pre-loaded, which are being offered at exorbitant prices on eBay.

While my 12-year-old, the pop-culture maven, was happy just to have the game nobody else can get now, my 10-year-old had a different perspective. In the past couple weeks, she’s been learning the basics of coding (including the oh-so-important lesson about how leaving out one simple symbol can render your whole string of instructions inoperable) via a website called CodeAcademy. When she read the story about Flappy Bird, her takeaway was that Nguyen had been making $50,000 a day from the game.

“But it’s free!” she said.

“He made that from the ads you see on the game,” I told her.

Now she understands why I’ve made such a big deal about her learning to code.

CodeNow offers programming instruction to students in the New York, San Francisco and Washington who otherwise might have little access to technology. According to CodeNow, “coding is the new literacy.” Today’s $10 goes there.

Feb. 11: CodeNow

CodeNow is currently accepting applications. Please read the information below to learn more! I believe this is the program Gracie recently went through. Feel free to ask her or I questions about this! 

Students who are accepted will receive a scholarship of $250 to participate in CodeNow. They will learn how to create interactive games and applications in the programming language Ruby. The students will receive individualized training from industry professional at a local tech company. Best of all, no prior programming skills are needed!

The training will be held February 15th, 16th and March 1st. We accept applications on a first-come, first-serve basis so please let your community know ASAP!

Interested students should apply online at http://codenow.org/apply/. A flyer with this information can be downloaded and printed here, and some FAQs about our program here.

To learn more about the CodeNow organization, please check out the video clip above from some of the students.

Our Future Programmers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy5M_15-vt0&feature=youtu.be

The White House Office of Public Engagement blog:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/10/28/codenow-champion-non-profit

The Wall Street Journal: