'Hour of Code' Announces It's Now Evolving Into 'Hour of AI' (hourofcode.com) 31
Last month Microsoft pledged $4 billion (in cash and AI/cloud technology) to "advance" AI education in K-12 schools, community and technical colleges, and nonprofits (according to a blog post by Microsoft President Brad Smith). But in the launch event video, Smith also says it's time to "switch hats" from coding to AI, adding that "the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code, but the future involves the Hour of AI."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: This sets the stage for Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi's announcement that his tech-backed nonprofit's [annual educational event] Hour of Code is being renamed to the Hour of AI... Explaining the pivot, Partovi says: "Computer science for the last 50 years has had a focal point around coding that's been — sort of like you learn computer science so that you create code. There's other things you learn, like data science and algorithms and cybersecurity, but the focal point has been coding.
"And we're now in a world where the focal point of computer science is shifting to AI... We all know that AI can write much of the code. You don't need to worry about where did the semicolons go, or did I close the parentheses or whatnot. The busy work of computer science is going to be done by the computer itself.
"The creativity, the thinking, the systems design, the engineering, the algorithm planning, the security concerns, privacy concerns, ethical concerns — those parts of computer science are going to be what remains with a focal point around AI. And what's going to be important is to make sure in education we give students the tools so they don't just become passive users of AI, but so that they learn how AI works."
Speaking to Microsoft's Smith, Partovi vows to redouble the nonprofit's policy work to "make this [AI literacy] a high school graduation requirement so that no student graduates school without at least a basic understanding of what's going to be part of the new liberal arts background [...] As you showed with your hat, we are renaming the Hour of Code to an Hour of AI."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: This sets the stage for Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi's announcement that his tech-backed nonprofit's [annual educational event] Hour of Code is being renamed to the Hour of AI... Explaining the pivot, Partovi says: "Computer science for the last 50 years has had a focal point around coding that's been — sort of like you learn computer science so that you create code. There's other things you learn, like data science and algorithms and cybersecurity, but the focal point has been coding.
"And we're now in a world where the focal point of computer science is shifting to AI... We all know that AI can write much of the code. You don't need to worry about where did the semicolons go, or did I close the parentheses or whatnot. The busy work of computer science is going to be done by the computer itself.
"The creativity, the thinking, the systems design, the engineering, the algorithm planning, the security concerns, privacy concerns, ethical concerns — those parts of computer science are going to be what remains with a focal point around AI. And what's going to be important is to make sure in education we give students the tools so they don't just become passive users of AI, but so that they learn how AI works."
Speaking to Microsoft's Smith, Partovi vows to redouble the nonprofit's policy work to "make this [AI literacy] a high school graduation requirement so that no student graduates school without at least a basic understanding of what's going to be part of the new liberal arts background [...] As you showed with your hat, we are renaming the Hour of Code to an Hour of AI."
Welp (Score:3)
There goes the neighborhood.
Re:Welp (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Welp (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Declining editorial oversight Many newsrooms, blogs, and even academic sites have cut human editors to save costs. Fewer eyes on text means more errors slipping through. 2. Speed-over-quality publishing culture Online writing now often prioritizes “fast” over “polished” because clicks reward first posts, not best posts. That means little time for proofreading or clarity checks. 3. Increased reliance on unedited AI-generated content Tools like ChatGPT can produce decent drafts quickly, but when unedited output is published as-is, you sometimes get fluent nonsense or subtle grammatical oddities. The results sound correct at first glance but don’t always make logical sense. 4. Informalization of writing Social media norms bleed into longer-form writing — quick, casual, unpunctuated bursts instead of structured, coherent arguments. 5. Possible erosion of writing skills If students and workers rely on autocorrect, autocomplete, and AI rewrites without really understanding the structure of good English, they may not develop the habit of reviewing for clarity, tone, or meaning.
As for your K-12 point — strong reading comprehension and clear writing skills absolutely need reinforcement in school, probably more than ever. AI can be a tool for better writing, but only if students already have the foundational grammar, structure, and critical thinking to catch when the AI gets it wrong. Right now, many people use AI more like a spell-check with a megaphone — it amplifies both strengths and weaknesses. If you want, I can walk through what a modern K-12 writing curriculum could look like that prepares kids to write well in an AI-saturated world — without relying on AI as a crutch.
Re: (Score:2)
On
Or use AI to achieve it
1
2
3 etc.
Re: (Score:2)
That renders as: First point Second point Third point If you’re working in a platform that supports only a very limited HTML subset (for example, some forums or content management systems), sometimes
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Speaking of intelligence, you were referring the "median" intelligence, not the average.
Re: Welp (Score:2)
* The Oakland school district, not the whole state of California.
Re:Welp (Score:5, Funny)
Sometime next month...
"We would like to make it easier for all teachers and students to become proficient in how AI works so we are announcing special pricing for our Ai365."
Re: (Score:3)
they screwed up "the hour of vibe".
AI fatigue (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed. I mean if it had by now delivered something really substantial. But 3 years later, it is still essentially nothing but an impressive demo with massive problems.
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Indeed. I mean if it had by now delivered something really substantial. But 3 years later, it is still essentially nothing but an impressive demo with massive problems.
As a human concerned for human employment, I’m confused. Are you complaining about the lack of Greed N. Corruptions ability to make you and a billion or two other humans permanently unemployable?
Just wondering what were ironically (or ignorantly) bitching about here. As if the AI breakthrough you’re clamoring for has consequences still shrouded in mystery on planet Greed.
Re: AI fatigue (Score:2)
AI image generation is very good now. AI video and audio generation are rapidly improving. AI robot guidance may yet become useful too.
It's mainly text generation, where every single byte has to make good sense, that's lacking a business case right now. (Ignoring legal ambiguity and union contract issues.)
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Eh, I don't mind it nearly as much as the cryptocurrency hype bubble. At least with AI, it's just the AI companies who are under the delusion that they might get rich someday. With crypto, every idiot and their brother thought they'd get rich if they shilled for it hard enough.
Fool Me Once? (Score:5, Funny)
2013 Code.org Launch: Leaders and trendsetters agree more students should learn to code [archive.org]
For that known use case (Score:5, Insightful)
Something called open source that the LLM copies from. And maybe some less than open for good measure. Oh, and throw away all the copyrights in the process. Hey, it's the latest in search engines.
Makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
Still "hour of bullshit"...
Ya, but ... (Score:5, Funny)
'Hour of Code' ... Evolving Into 'Hour of AI'
Isn't AI suppose to make things more efficient? So shouldn't it be the Half-Hour of AI or the Forty-Five Minutes of AI?
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Statistically, it should be the "80 Minutes of AI"
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not teaching kids is dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
so we decided that instead of teaching kids how to code, we will teach them to rely on dumb black boxes generating output they can't understand, can't fix, can't maintain?
nothing is shifting in the focus, it's just clueless marketing people encouraging everyone to jump the hype train.
it's a tool, not a panacea.
Hour of mediocre (Score:5, Insightful)
Coding arguably requires talent - although Microsoft has been proving consistently for half a century that you can be a successful software company with piss-poor engineers.
But even if AI produced perfect code, then producing software essentially requires no talent. I'm not saying it's a bad thing in itself, but it moves the act of producing software squarely into the realm of everyday mediocre accessible to everyday talentless people.
And on top of that, the fallacy is that AI simply doesn't produce anywhere near anything that resembles perfect code. But of course, Microsoft is desperate to have you believe otherwise...
I'll just say this: I'm glad I'm at the end of my career as a software engineer, because I didn't spend a lifetime honing my skills to end up a mediocre types-question-guy [youtu.be].
Honestly a really really good idea. (Score:2)
...if they spend most of the time explaining what AI cannot be trusted to do correctly. Clearly RFK needed to learn this (hence his citations of medical research that never took place) and every couple months there's a new story about a lawyer who cited cases that never happened.
At work we just had a junior engineer submit a huge code review for what we thought was a minor change, and it was horrifying. AI is not a substitute for thinking.
Translation (Score:3)
Our future employees will need to use our AI products and we don't want to spend our money teaching them a niche skill they can take to their next employer.
Doesn't sound good to me (Score:2)
The whole "use AI instead" here sounds like "Learn a tech that only works for you as long as we provide the base" and I am not even talking about cloud dependencies, but about someone training the models needed to code without knowing code. I think everyone should find out how to use AI to work faster on code, but people should still learn to code. AI can even explain things while learning, but you need definitely more than learning some buzzwords in English so the LLM spits out some code you don't understa