Celebrating 50 years of Kids Coding @codeorg #HourOfCode
Last year the daily Google Doodle featured the first ever coding doodle during computer science education week, Champika Fernando shared the backstory on the programmable doodle, Via GOOGLE
Today, during Computer Science Education Week, we celebrate 50 years since kids programming languages were first introduced to the world with a very special creation (and furry friend): our first ever kids focused coding Google Doodle! Today’s Doodle was developed through the close teamwork of not one or two but THREE teams: the Google Doodle team, Google Blockly team, and researchers from MIT Scratch!
To learn more about the history and importance of kids coding languages, we invited Champika Fernando, one of the project’s most passionate collaborators at MIT, to share her thoughts:
My first experience with coding was in a free after-school program back in the eighties when I was nine years old. We programmed a little green turtle to move around and draw lines on a black screen. That programming language was called Logo.
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With today’s Doodle — the first coding Doodle ever — we celebrate fifty years of coding languages for kids by “Coding for Carrots.” In the interactive Doodle, you program and help a furry friend across 6 levels in a quest to gather its favorite food by snapping together coding blocks based on the Scratch programming language for kids.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: CircuitPython 8.1.0 and 8.2.0-beta0 out and so much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
