2014 Hour of Code: Do Ends Justify Disney Product Placement Means? 125
theodp writes "The purpose of product placement/product integration/branded entertainment," explains Disney in a job posting, "is to give a brand exposure outside of their traditional media buy." So, one imagines the folks in Disney Marketing must be thrilled that Disney Frozen princesses Anna and Elsa will be featured in the 'signature tutorial' for CSEdWeek's 2014 Hour of Code, which aims to introduce CS to 100 million schoolkids — including a sizable captive audience — in the weeks before Christmas. "Thanks to Disney Interactive," announced Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi, "Code.org's signature tutorial for the 2014 Hour of Code features Disney Infinity versions of Disney's 'Frozen' heroines Anna and Elsa!." Partovi adds, "The girl-power theme of the tutorial is a continuation of our efforts to expand diversity in computer science and broaden female participation in the field, starting with younger students." In the tutorial, reports the LA Times, "students will learn to write code to help Anna and Elsa draw snowflakes and snowmen, and perform magical 'ice craft.' Disney is also donating $100,000 to support Code.org's efforts to bring computer science education to after-school programs nationwide."
If the goal is to interest girls in coding (Score:2, Insightful)
This should accomplish it for a substantial portion of the female population...
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If that was sexist, then CSEdWeek is sexist too -- because it appears that interesting young women in coding by providing a tie in to Disney heroines is exactly their goal.
Sexist? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever talked to a little girl? Saying that having to Frozen characters involved might interest more little girls is not sexism, it's the most common of sense.
People like you say you want more women in coding but don't want to do anything real to make it happen, at the level it needs to happen - early education.
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Have you ever talked to a little girl?
Of course not. I'm a single white man. Talking to a little girl is a sure fire way of getting the police called.
Saying that having to Frozen characters involved might interest more little girls is not sexism, it's the most common of sense.
Wait. You're trying to attract a single sex, but that's not sexism for some reason, despite the fact that you're explicitly trying to make something more attractive to only one sex and not the other. Uh, OK. Not sure how this logic works.
People like you say you want more women in coding but don't want to do anything real to make it happen, at the level it needs to happen - early education.
Who the hell is saying that? I certainly haven't been. Women and men are different, and women by and large do not like to code. Why should we force women
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Bullshit. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. Period. You may call it "positive sexism" but it's still sexism. (It's also weird how this "positive sexism" doesn't apply to increasing the number of men teaching elementary school or the number of women garbage collectors. Wonder why THAT is.)
If I tell my best friend he's talking bullshit, he isn't likely to take offence, as he knows how much I respect him and his views. If I tell a stranger he's talking bullshit, it's offensive, because there is no background of respect between us. Therefore I discriminate between people in the way I speak to them. Is it not clear, then, that discrimination is not inherently a bad thing?
Sexism is a lack of equality of respect, not mere lack of parity in opportunity.
At the weekend, I had to do the "false boyfr
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Would you like to be a woman in a world like this? Where you need a man to "save" you from another man?
Of course not, that's why he's probably violently homophobic as well.
And I'm sure that he very secretly wishes he would be hit on by persistent females frequently, so he can't imagine why a woman would object to what would be his greatest fantasy.
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Would you like to be a woman in a world like this? Where you need a man to "save" you from another man?
Of course not, that's why he's probably violently homophobic as well. And I'm sure that he very secretly wishes he would be hit on by persistent females frequently, so he can't imagine why a woman would object to what would be his greatest fantasy.
You really are a fucking moron aren't you?
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Bullshit. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. Period. You may call it "positive sexism" but it's still sexism. (It's also weird how this "positive sexism" doesn't apply to increasing the number of men teaching elementary school or the number of women garbage collectors. Wonder why THAT is.)
I totally agree, discrimination is discrimination is discrimination.
However, why the hell are we talking about discrimination? We are talking about a coding initiative using characters from a Disney Movie. I am aware of both men and women who dislike Frozen. My nephew, who I think is about 7 or 8, rather likes it, for instance.
You are a man who doesn't like Frozen? Perhaps your son or other male children in your family do not like frozen? That's not a problem, I am a 25 year old dude and I don't like it eit
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Who the hell is saying that? I certainly haven't been. Women and men are different, and women by and large do not like to code. Why should we force women to do something they clearly don't enjoy doing? To try and balance out a meaningless diversity pie chart?
If you want an example of real sexism, this part of your post is. It is also incorrect in my experience, some of the best programmers I know are female.
In regard to you point about targeting one particular gender group as being sexist, unfortunately society divides us at a very young age and you need to appeal to kids interests to get them involved. I'm sure there is equally as many (probably more) male targeted programming courses.
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because he missed the fact that back in 1984 almost 40% of comp sci majors were women. Let's say there is some small statistical difference, history tells us it won't be 75/25 but much closer to 45/55 (because in 1984 there were still large barriers to women in many colleges).
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I don't even look at little girls, much less talk to them...Once they are 18+, then we'll see.
Sexism aside; I'm the father of two girls, both of which had computers and other paraphernalia around them since they were born to a geeky father, whose live revolves around coding... And none of them is even remotely interested in computers beyond email, FB or whatever they use now.
One, graduated in business administration with a specialty in hotel and restaurant management; the other is studying Forensic Science
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As a geek, what is this bullshit that one has to be interested in computers and particularly in coding? There is engineering, math and yes, criminalistics.
Coding is a general skill - there isn't a single white-collar job that can't be automated to improve efficiency, if only people knew how to do it. When I moved from programming into "IT" (apps, servers and networks), my bosses gave me various shitty data entry/collection tasks. It hadn't occurred to them that manual work was a mugs game. The first morning of each task I spent experimenting to refine batch scripts, keyboard macros etc. By lunchtime, I'd have a quick-and-dirty process that produced a text fil
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Both of my daughters type between 120 and 140wpm, where I topped out at 95. Point being, they grew up surrounded by technology, infrastructure, and encouragement. (D+ in science? I'm surprised, since Science is your best subject. Psych bullshit but I tried every subtle mind game to encourage her. She responded with an A+, and straight-A'd her way through high school and uni from then on.) Eldest is a successful banking marketer expanding into teaching yoga, youngest is doing well in uni but unsure, and I'll
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Have you ever talked to a little girl? Saying that having to Frozen characters involved might interest more little girls is not sexism, it's the most common of sense.
People like you say you want more women in coding but don't want to do anything real to make it happen, at the level it needs to happen - early education.
Too bad we're too busy painting all of the computers pink and adding Disney cartoon theme songs to debuggers. We should probably take some time to teach those young women a thing or two about equality. You know, that thing we're so desperate to quash in IT...
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Have you ever talked to a little girl? Saying that having to Frozen characters involved might interest more little girls is not sexism, it's the most common of sense.
Off the cuff, I'd say if you were going to get my kid into coding, Minecraft would be the better angle. Not only more directly connected (code this, get that in your Favorite Game of all time), it's gender-neutral *and* probably better correlation. (Just gonna guess the Minecraft-programmer overlap is a bit wider than the princess-programmer, based on my daughter's circle of friends).
Even for Disney, I'd have picked Vanellope Von Schweetz (from Wreck-It Ralph). Bit more connectivity there.
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I worked for years in a similar field(male dominated), derivatives trading at a bank. I never understood why women wouldn't/couldn't measure up and the floors are really male dominated on the trading side. In my time at the bank, I knew only 2 senior female trader and a handful of junior ones.
when I started taking over our summer intern training and development, I started to notice a big gap. I'm ultra aggressive and it turns out my style of training attracted and resonated with men in out summer intern
Re:If the goal is to interest girls in coding (Score:5, Funny)
Not if the Disney princesses have all graduated from the Barbie school of management.
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Don't you mean "Schools of Game Design and Computer Security"?
Re:If the goal is to interest girls in coding (Score:5, Insightful)
No the book had one minor error. The title was mistakenly printed as:
"I can be a computer engineer"
when it was meant to be:
"I can be an MBA"
Once that fix is made everything makes perfect sense: come up with a high level "idea", find some sucker to do it for you, leave a trail of desctuction and then take all credit for the success.
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"And so girls, you too can be computer programmers, just like Anna and Elsa!"
[little boy raises his hand] "Can *I* be a computer programmer too?"
"SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP, OPPRESSOR!!"
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Yes, because getting boys interested in computer programming has been a major problem...
Oh, and encouraging girls must necessarily also mean discouraging boys.
Do you hear yourself?
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Yes, because getting boys interested in computer programming has been a major problem...
Oh, and encouraging girls must necessarily also mean discouraging boys.
Do you hear yourself?
This discussion is especially hilarious because pro-male gender bias (marketing of early home computers strictly to boys starting in the early 80s) predated IT/CS being male-dominated, and all these guys are showing up just to say "hey you get your damn dirty discriminating paws off of the perfectly egalitarian IT/CS system!". If it weren't for biased sales and marketing there likely would be a very narrow gap between men and women in CS. More importantly, lots of very talented women would be able to displ
Holy Crap DO NOT WANT (Score:1)
I'm doing Calculus homework right now... I can just imagine:
"A conical funnel is pouring delicious CocaCola TM in to glass bottles. If the glass bottles have an available volume of 355ml and the funnel produces 100 bottles of refreshing beverage per hour: what is the minimum conical volume which will meet this rate of production if gravity feeds the liquid through a 1cm internal diameter on the bottle mouth?
Re:Holy Crap DO NOT WANT (Score:4, Funny)
I'm doing accounting and I've got a similar question but it's about how much their markup is.
But my calculator just keeps saying "E".
Re:Holy Crap DO NOT WANT (Score:4, Informative)
But my calculator just keeps saying "E".
14 seems quite low for the expected markup.
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I wonder if this is similar to how normal word problems are for people who find them difficult -- tricky to weed out the irrelevant information and convert to formulas.
SlashDice... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah, gripe about product placement all over SlashDice.com...
Of course not! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's reprehensible that they leverage this incredibly popular brand to teach girls to code when they could be using it to sell Happy Meals and next year's landfill fodder. Shame, shame!
Re: Of course not! (Score:3, Interesting)
My sentiments exactly. These characters are already incredibly popular. In another situation, someone may be paying Disney to use them to keep the attention of young people, instead Disney's shelling out $100k for it. Especially since once the kids are capable or interested in programming they don't need to include anybody or anything into their code they don't want to, who or how does this hurt?
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I agree, the synergies here are obvious...
Ha ha ha... He said "synergies" ...
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now if he can only change the paradigm...
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Re:Of course not! (Score:5, Funny)
It's reprehensible that they leverage this incredibly popular brand to teach girls to code when they could be using it to sell Happy Meals and next year's landfill fodder. Shame, shame!
You're missing the point: Disney is exploiting the incredible popularity of Hour of Code among young girls in order to boost their poorly-performing movie.
That might be shameful if it weren't so completely ludicrous.
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I know it is popular these days in our little nerd bubble to hate on positive portrayals of girls, but when the highest-grossing film of 2013 gets called poorly-performing, I think it is time you turn in your geek card and search for a forum more appropriate to your intelligence.
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Which girl was the positive portrayal? The ditsy airhead who fell in love with an obvious creep about 20 seconds after meeting him, or the ice queen bitch who shut everyone out of her life and went on to live alone in an ice castle. Lucky that ice cutter (prince) guy was there to help the ditsy one or they never would have even made it to the castle.
Sure, these princesses aren't as completely helpless as a whole bunch of other Disney princesses, but they're certainly also not empowered woman providing a goo
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It beats my generation's Disney princesses. The lesson of The Little Mermaid was "shut up and be pretty and a man will give you things."
It's not wrong, though.
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Which girl was the positive portrayal? The ditsy airhead who fell in love with an obvious creep about 20 seconds after meeting him, or the ice queen bitch who shut everyone out of her life and went on to live alone in an ice castle. Lucky that ice cutter (prince) guy was there to help the ditsy one or they never would have even made it to the castle.
Sure, these princesses aren't as completely helpless as a whole bunch of other Disney princesses, but they're certainly also not empowered woman providing a good role model.
Honestly, I'll take the fact that they have actual personalities and motivations as a good start. They do stuff, at least. (Yes, vaguely stupid stuff, but apparently Brave didn't do so well, so we're not ready to ditch the mandatory romantic plot just yet. Pity).
(Still impressed they didn't go with the "ice guy hooks up with ice powers lady"..) Disney might be learning...
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Since whoosh.
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Although I think it's a trade worth making, I don't think the concern should be dismissed in such an out of hand manner. Just because children are being bombarded with branding everywhere else doesn't mean that it's a non-issue putting it somewhere else.
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Fourth time's the charm. :-)
Marketspeak (Score:4)
"The purpose of product placement/product integration/branded entertainment," explains Disney in a job posting, "is to give a brand exposure outside of their traditional media buy."
Let me translate that in to normal English:
"The purpose of product placement ads is to shove advertising down people's throats until they choke to death on it so we can rifle through the corpse's pockets for loose change." Or, more realistically, "Our normal advertising is so annoying and offensive (because all advertising is, these days) that we have to find other ways to force it on to people because if advertising doesn't actually work, we'll all lose our jobs had have to actually work for a living."
Fuck Disney.
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So you don't think that having a known character assist wtih something educational is good? If my kids can learn the 50 states and their capitals with the assitance of the Warner brothers (and their sister Dot), why should I complain that a cartoon franchise character is doing the teaching?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Granted, with the Frozen tie in it is much more appealing to my 4 year old than my 14 year old daughter, Now to get my 10 year old son involved, you'll need to fall back to Lego... or Sta
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Granted, with the Frozen tie in it is much more appealing to my 4 year old than my 14 year old daughter, Now to get my 10 year old son involved, you'll need to fall back to Lego... or Star Wars. Or Lego Star Wars.
There'd be much less pissing and moaning from the peanut gallery if that happened.
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The characters Elsa and Anna aren't adverts, they're characters. Very popular characters, that Disney can charge companies big money to have associated with their shit. In this case, Disney are giving away the rights to use these popular characters, and donating $100,000. Fuck Disney? Fuck you. You're so in love with your cynicism you haven't noticed how retarded it's made you.
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To add to this: they were characters that were so popular that, less than a year after their movie came out, they were put into ABC/Disney's Once Upon A Time TV series as major characters for its fourth season.
Which acts (more or less) as a sequel to the movie.
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Actually, I see product placement (in movies) as the solution to the piracy problem. Newspapers and broadcast TV made money from the embedded ads and not subscriptions. If movies made money from product placement ads, you could give them away for f
Disney Sued Over Alleged No-Coder-Poaching Accord (Score:2)
Disney, DreamWorks Sued Over Alleged No-Poaching Accord [bloomberg.com]: "Walt Disney Co., DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. and other film industry companies were sued in an antitrust case that may reflect a new wave of litigation applying traditional price-fixing claims to labor markets. Today's lawsuit accusing the California-based companies of colluding to not hire each other's software engineers , digital artists and animators comes as Apple Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. are trying to resolve simi
Elsa, Elsa! (Score:2)
<knock, knock>
Would you like to work at Disney?
Oh so many pro-per-ties
Their imagineering can't be beat
And Marvel's neat
Don't forget their great ben-nies
Spielberg sure can tell a story, no arg-u-ment,
But you could work on Pix-ar's team.
Do you want a job at Disney?
Or maybe a sub-si-diary
Dreamworks HR: Go away, Anna. ...
Ok, bye
Elsa, Elsa! (Score:4, Funny)
students will learn to write code to help Anna and Elsa draw snowflakes and snowmen, and perform magical 'ice craft.'
Do you want to draw a snowman? ...
No-not with paper and pen,
Take this keyboard and type in these words,
like all these nerds,
and you will see that then
SYNTAX ERROR
Or how about some 'ice craft'.
We can make things appear on this screen...
Hmm, I guess that's cool.
Elsa: I have colored pencils, paper, and some stencils.
Anna: That sounds like a much better way to draw a snowman, let's do that instead. And, I have some cloth, sticks, and lights to make us actual, physical wands to play with!
Elsa: That's awesome!
Anna: I'm so glad I have you as a sister.
Elsa: You're the best.
The End.
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they own the rights to any code that kids trun out for the next 10 years.
Not What I Guessed (Score:2)
I can't believe I didn't guess that this was the particular flavor of corporate whoring that Gates and Zuckerberg were up to. Get into the educational pipeline with whatever education issue is hot (it started as just STEM, but then shifted to women in STEM when that started sizzling, if you'll remember). Get some big names to attach their reputations to its success. Then start selling ad space to Disney, who can't get much traction buying ad space inside the schools themselves. I should have guessed, but I
ad tech (Score:2)
"The purpose of product placement/product integration/branded entertainment," explains Disney in a job posting, "is to give a brand exposure outside of their traditional media buy."
Everyone who works in ad-tech has some justification for why it's ok.
which is why we do not buy disney (Score:2)
I can not stand either one and CRINGE every time that one of my kids want something from them.
Disney and LEGO are very different (Score:5, Insightful)
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you mean where disney is legally required to sue the daycares if it wants to keep its trademarks valid against actual encroachment, because people could legitimately argue "you let that profit making company knowingly use your trademark for 0 dollars, so charging us more would be illegal"?
yeah, take issue with trademark law and the fact you HAVE to fight once it comes to your attention else you devalue your trademark in all future legit negotiations. You seem to think disney likes being forced to employ ex
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people could legitimately argue "you let that profit making company knowingly use your trademark for 0 dollars, so charging us more would be illegal"
I'd be interested in reading a citation supporting your theory that granting a nonexclusive license for qualifying noncommercial uses will weaken a trademark.
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Ooh, lots of dubious assertions to riposte. :-)
people could legitimately argue "you let that profit making company knowingly use your trademark for 0 dollars, so charging us more would be illegal"
There is nothing illegal about charging people different rates for the same thing unless the way you do it is in violation of regulated industry rules or non-discrimination laws. It is perfectly legal for me to sell identical used cars to you for $1000 and to the next guy for $2000 because you negotiated better. It is illegal for me to charge him $2000 because he's black and $1000 to you because you're white; or for my utility to charge you $200/kWh when the PU
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Nope. Both are about as fucking evil as you will find in toys. I am waiting for lead and arsenic to show up in the legos.
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Disney sues people for putting a picture of Mickey Mouse on the wall of a day care.
The day care centers you mention (about a 3 hr. drive from Disney World) were being run for-profit.
The Disney characters were used for image-building and not just for decoration.
That is why Universal Studios bull-dozed its way into the story. The risk of course is that despite its gifts of toys, posters, and such, Universal had no real control over how well these day care centers were bring run.
It's the kind of PR stunt that sucks big-time when anything goes wrong, if for example, one of the day care c
Hey! (Score:2)
Yeah, I get it! Girls can freak out and, you know, freeze all the code a few days before release.
OK, fine. I got nothin'. I'll keep my day job ...
This was a good choice (Score:2)
Elsa is the perfect programming role model
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No slippery slope (Score:2)
There is no slippery slope in product placement for youth education.
1. Entertainment is different from education.
2. Youth are different from adults.
Consider industry-sponsored medical education. Western society accepts this, because speakers must acknowledge their funding sources. This allows the (highly educated) audience to evaluate based on inherent biases of the speaker and the quality of the research.
For an educational program designed for youth, we cannot accept that acknowledgement of funding sourc
I'm just curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Where was the outrage over last years Plants and Zombies/ Angry Birds themed hour of code?
Is it the branding bothering people, or that girls are being focused on this time around?
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There's a saying in my native language: "Higher trees catch more wind". I think the most obvious reason why this gets more attention now is the size of the organisation doing the product placement.
Well (Score:4, Interesting)
"The girl-power theme of the tutorial is a continuation of our efforts to expand diversity in computer science and broaden female participation in the field, starting with younger students."
How patronizing.
Seriously, who gives a shit? (Score:2)
If Disney wants to throw $$ at a meaningful, beneficial event and in return they get to plaster their product placement all over it in ways that don't actually detract from the facts/lesson being delivered - who cares? Hell, I hope it starts a bidding war in which the tutorial characters are eventually covered in ads like an Indy race-driver suit.* The sad consequence would be, of course, the fund swimming in cash. Tragedy!
*I personally believe that someday someone will actually cost-benefit out media ad
Anna and Elsa... (Score:2)
... but not Yori, Quorra or even Vanellope?
Selling stuff to kids (Score:1)
The obligatory reference must be made (Score:2)
Just "let it go!" (Score:2)
Seriously, "Let it Go!"
Prince Charming (Score:2)
I foresee a dark future of lonely princesses spinning code in the top of a locked tower, waiting for their Prince Charming to come along and save it.
Yes, they do. (Score:1)
I teach math at an all girls school. I also teach coding, both within my class and in summer camps and a short, optional 3-week class in the winter. Next year, I hope to be teaching a full semester Computer science course. And the answer to this question is a solid YES. The Hour of Code tutorials are amazing, but my girls last summer were only vaguely interested in the plants, zombies, and angry birds of last year. Elsa and Anna will hold their attention more, help them learn the basics, so that when they d
"Ends justify the means" is usually meant to imply (Score:2)
"Ends justify the means" is usually meant to imply that the means are bad, but potentially excusable.
What exactly is wrong with the "means" here? I hate Disney's copyright practices, but other than that, I can't fault them. They have a dedication to quality which I wish were seen elsewhere.