Code.org is a relatively new but now popular organization (founded in 2013) whose purpose is to not only motivate people all over the world, especially school children, to learn how to code, but to also help them do so by giving free coding lessons online.
They do this via their eponymous website (www.code.org) where anyone can take free lessons of his or her choice from the offered curriculum.
But another important part of their efforts is the Hour of Code challenge. Which they first held in December 2013, during Computer Science Education week (9th of December to 15th of December) when they launched the concept. The Hour of Code consists of a tutorial that teaches the basics of computer science to anyone who is interested, in under one hour, using a visual programming language called Blockly.
Since its launch in 2013, a new tutorial teaching the same concepts was modeled for each year. In 2014, for example users could learn to make and then customize their own Flappy Bird game.
And now, in 2015, the Hour of Code tutorial is Minecraft-oriented. Meaning that potential learners will use Blockly to give instructions to one of two characters of their choice Steve (male) or Alex (female) so that they can perform increasingly difficult tasks over the course of 14 levels in an interface visually similar to the Minecraft environment.
The emphasis behind this being that Minecraft uses the same basic programming and computer science concepts being taught in the Hour of Code, this enticing potential learners because of Minecraft’s huge popularity and appeal, a fact which incidentally has been consistently confirmed by learner’s requests that Code.org kept receiving to make a Minecraft-themed tutorial up to now.
And speaking of enticing learners, Code.org designed the last of the 14 levels in this Hour Of Code Minecraft tutorial to be a free play experience, without a pre-determined set of tasks to do, similar to Minecraft, allowing them to choose from several actions and make their own decisions, in the hope that it would have replay value and they would return to play.
But this would not have been possible without Microsoft (who owns Minecraft, having bought it last year). Because Microsoft, apart from being one of Code.org’s high-profile and generous backers (along with Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Apple and others), with more than 3 million $ donated to Code.org so far, gave the company the right to use the Minecraft name without charge. And also pitched in with a few developers of its own to write this new tutorial.
It also says it was more than happy to help make this tutorial a reality because they had the intention of somehow using Minecraft for education since January and this is a perfect opportunity.
Image source: 1.
