CodeUur: Getting 10,000 Dutch school kids to code
CodeUur (HourOfCode) is a global movement promoting programming (“coding”) to millions of children and students all over the world. Today, October 14th, the Dutch chapter CodeUur organized an attempt to break the World Record Programming for Children. To do so, the organization needed to get as many as 10,000 Dutch school kids to participate in a one-hour programming lesson.
CodeUur created educational material to support the hour of code lesson. Children were asked to program a game using Scratch to fly a drone to protect elephants in Africa from being poached. Scratch is a project of the MIT Media Lab and is designed specifically to help kids to learn (and get interested into) programming.
Dutch developers and programmers were asked to join and assist as guest teachers in elementary schools all over the country. Elements’ Marcel Sondaar signed up to be one of the many guest teachers to give a lesson on a school nearby. Marcel was invited by Dr. Maria Montessorischool in Huizen. After watching some introduction videos, Marcel explained the objective and assisted about 36 kids in programming the game using Scratch. The children picked up the concept of programming in Scratch surprisingly well. At the end of the hour, most groups of kids indeed had their game completed. Well done, guys!
At the end of the hour it became clear that 11,368 school kids had participated, so the record was broken! Hopefully today a lot of children got interested in programming and will consider a career in tech in a few years!
Originally published at www.elements.nl on October 14, 2016.
