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Hour Of Code: President Obama Takes On Computer Science

Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:42 PM
Connie Kearney
Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:42 PM

obama coder in chiefPresident Barack Obama has become the first US President to program a computer. The president accomplished this goal on December 8, 2014 at an Hour of Code  event. Hour of Code is a global effort to get children excited about coding and to show that anybody can try computer science, and that learning the basics is the best way to prepare for any career today.

President Obama, Coder-in-Chief

On its official blog , Code.org (the organization behind the event) claims it reached 53 million students from around the world last year with its hour-long tutorial about basic coding. This year their goal is for Hour of Code to reach 100 million. And with only three weeks left in 2014, the team is half-way there.

President Obama’s coding efforts were part of the White House’s Computer Science Education Week. In the event kickoff video the president reached out to students saying,

Don’t just consume things. Create things. Take an hour to learn more about the technology that touches every part of our lives. That’s how you can prepare yourself with the skills you need for your future. And it’s how you can help prepare our country for the future as well.

Code.org brought 20 middle school students from the South Seventeenth Street School in Newark, New Jersey to the White House, where they met President Obama and worked on coding tutorials. Hadi Partovi, co-founder Code.org, says the president himself did not complete the Hour of Code tutorial from beginning to end, but instead visited each station and observed the students working. Although, he did, in fact, complete some of the exercises that involved using Google’s Blockly programming language, and he even wrote a line of code using JavaScript.

You can watch the full kickoff video below.

What do you think? Would you like to see more teachers and educators begin to bring Hour of Code into their classrooms? Comment below!

Images from Shutterstock.