December 9th is Grace Hopper's birthday and it falls in Computer Science Education Week - the week in which in 2015 millions of school students around the world will experience an Hour of Code. This year other big names are getting involved.

As well as being remembered for the term "bug" and for pioneering natural language in computing, Grace Hopper's name is linked with computer science education. It is therefore no coincidence that the second week in December was chosen to be CSEd Week.  

The first CSEd Week was in 2010 and was confined to the United States. Since 2013, the year in which Code.org was established and the Hour of Code was introduced, it has become a global phenomenon and this week over 192,000 Hour of Code events have been organized around the world and Apple, Microsoft, Disney, the Cartoon Network and the Russian Government are among the organisations getting involved.

On December 10th Apple's worldwide network of 468 stores is holding "The Hour of Code Youth Workshop" for kids aged 6-13 allowing them to complete one of the many online tutorials that are available.

After the undisputed success of the Frozen Hour of Code tutorial last year, Disney has again teamed up with Code-org for the tutorial that takes top billing, this year based on Star Wars. This partnership seems to be successful in profile raising and Cartoon Network is the latest recruit to the cause. Its contribution is a series of Scratch tutorials and sample projects featuring characters, scenes and sounds from We Bare Bears. These have been produced in collaboration with the Scratch team at MIT Media Lab and are backed up with facilitator guides for educators and afterschool providers.

We have already reported on Microsoft's Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial, which had already been sampled 2.4 million times even before CSEd week,  but that's just part of its contribution. Microsoft is also hosting Hour of Code events at its stores and other venues and its employees have responded to Code.org's request for volunteers to go into schools. Setting this example, CEO Satya Nadella, is this week teaching coding to fourth grade students in a Seattle public elementary school.

Microsoft is one of the partners helping the Russian Federation Ministry of Communications and Mass Communications organize its program of events for CSEd week. Last year over 7 million school children were introduced to computer programming with its inaugural events and its hopes to build on this success to reach even more.

More Information

Computer Science Education Week

Hour of Code

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