Code.org Stats: 507MM LOC, 6.8MM Kids, 2K YouTube Views 123
theodp writes "On the final day of Computer Science Education Week, the Hour of Code bravado continues. Around 12:30 a.m. Sunday (ET), Code.org was boasting that in just 6 days, students of its tutorials have "written" more than 10x the number of lines of code in Microsoft Windows. "Students of the Code.org tutorials have written 507,152,775 lines of code. Is this a lot? By comparison, the Microsoft Windows operating system has roughly 50 million lines of code." Code.org adds, "In total, 15,481,846 students have participated in the Hour of Code. Of this group, 6,872,757 of them used the tutorials by Code.org, and within the Code.org tutorial, they've written 507,152,775 lines of code." On YouTube, however, a playlist of the Code.org tutorial videos has distinctly lower numbers, with only 2,246 views of the Code.org Wrap Up video reported as of this writing. So, any thoughts on why the big disconnect, and how close the stats might reflect reality? Code.org does explain that an 'Hour of Code' is not necessarily an 'hour of code' ("Not everybody finishes an Hour of Code tutorial. Some students spend one hour. Some spend 10 minutes. Some spend days. Instead of counting how many students 'finish one hour'; or how much time they spent, this [LOC] is our simplest measure of progress"). So, with millions being spent on efforts to get Code.org into the nation's schools — New York and Chicago have already committed their 1.5 million K-12 students — is it important to get a better understanding of what the Hour of Code usage stats actually represent — and what their limitations might be — and not just accept as gospel reports like AllThingsD's 15 Million Students Learned to Program This Week, Thanks to Hour of Code ("every other school family in the U.S. has a child that has done the Hour of Code")?"
well... (Score:5, Interesting)
How many of those were actually students? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's enough for many Rubyists. (Score:3, Interesting)
I was a hiring manager back in 1998-2000, and on occasion I still have to interview people today for programming positions.
You wouldn't believe how little experience some people will consider "sufficient" these days. It's worse for some positions, mainly those involving Ruby, and also those involving JavaScript.
I routinely get applicants who list themselves as having experience with both, yet in phone interviews or in person we quickly find out that they literally had written less than 100 lines of code in those languages. I've even had several self-proclaimed Ruby on Rails programmers say their experience is based solely on having read that weird-as-fuck whythehappystuff's "Ruby Guide for Baristas" (or whatever his name is and whatever his e-book is actually called), without having actually done any coding. And they're out there applying for jobs in industry!
It's much like it was in the late 1990s, except at least then it was understandable that some people may not have had experience with the latest technologies, given how new they were, and how fast things are moving. But there's no excuse today. These types of initiatives may even make the situation worse, by making highly-unqualified individuals mistakenly think they are far more adept than they actually are, to the point of wasting the time and effort of those of us in industry, even if it just filtering out their horrid resumes and job applications by the tens of thousands.
YouTube is blocked (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally ran this last week with almost 200 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, and will be doing it Monday and Tuesday to make up for snow days last week.
First, because their lab time is an hour and we also did a warm up and closing lecture, most kids didn't get to all 20 exercises in the first blockly set - we had perhaps 15 kids get all the way through it. Second, Most of the kids weren't patient enough to watch *any* of the videos, clicking through them to get to the next exercise. The dude from NASA in that last video talks for a while about the problem they just solved - it took about 7 seconds for the kids to get bored hearing about what they just solved, and they wanted to jump to the part where they could get their certificate at the end.
In my kids' school I had to prearrange to unblock access to all of this stuff as well. I'm sure there are plenty of schools that unblocked code.org, but not YouTube... so they could do the exercises but not watch videos.
It's about inspiring students... (Score:4, Interesting)
I started to notice my father would spend many hours working on something so I started asking him what he was doing. Being the type to turn everything into a teaching moment, he would explain that he was programming in Pascal. I thought it was cool that he could create programs, but didn't think much about it until a few years later when he bought a new PC. I saw him coding in QuickBasic 4.5 where he could program with graphics and compile to an EXE. I started asking more and more questions until he started to let me try it out. Soon I was hooked and learned all the basics and advanced stuff of QB, eventually moved on the Visual Basic, some assembly, and eventually into more modern stuff. Now I code in C#, C, C++, Javascript, PHP, and others and love it.
The point being, all those years ago my father inspired me and got me interested in coding at such a pivotal age. I have taken those skills and interests and applied them to many areas of my life even though I do not code for a career. The whole idea of Code.Org is to inspire and get kids interested in it. It fosters higher levels of thinking, feeling of accomplishments, and give them a purpose in life instead of just consuming things like games and mindless entertainment.
I think it's just great what they are doing, and having Gates and Zuckerburg as spokesman is also great!
Re:Worth it. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's true that there's a lot of ridiculous hype and grandstanding about this, but either way, people are getting a chance to be introduced to programming in an interesting way, and possibly learning from it.
Now it's time for the angry hordes to come tell us why we're wrong and why this is horrible.
As you wish.
The Hour of Code was teaching the outdated, sequential type of programming that Dijkstra was complaining about [utexas.edu] back in 1975. It was already problematic back when most computers had a single processor, but it's completely inadequate in an increasingly parallel world. Any student who wishes to make sense of a concurrent program, or a monadic program, will have to unlearn bad habits and start again.
2013 Code.org Like Dumbed-Down 1973 PLATO? (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably worth mentioning that Code.org's online programming tutorial for kids, created in 2013 with collaboration with engineers from Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Facebook, is kind of like a dumbed-down, albeit slicker, version of online instruction given to children in 1973 [staticflickr.com] on the University of Illinois' PLATO computer-assisted instruction system.
Programming by Children (1973) [uni-stuttgart.de]: "Young children can be taught the basic elements of programming...In Figure 7a the child has walked the man, one step at a time, through a maze."
Overview of Code.org's Hour of Code activity (2013) [code.org]: "Our activity is a set of 20 self-guided puzzles that teach the basics of computer science for users with no prior experience. In each puzzle, students write a program that gets a character through a maze."
Re:well... (Score:2, Interesting)
Fewer.
'Less' is correct, unless you are able to count all the bugs in Windows.
There are fewer legs on an ant than a spider. There is less sand in the desert than bugs in Windows.