So Monday the president sat down at a laptop in the White House and dragged some code blocks around to make a little character jump across the screen, and by Tuesday morning every tech outlet had a post up about how Obama was "the first sitting president to write a line of code." It's Computer Science Education Week, Code.org is running its Hour of Code push through the 14th, and half my Twitter feed is either gushing about it or rolling its eyes at it. I did neither. I just went and did the tutorial myself Monday night, the actual Frozen-themed one with Elsa and Anna skating around drawing snowflake patterns, because I wanted to see what exactly the leader of the free world spent twenty minutes doing.
Quick honesty check before I go further: I've been writing actual code for a living since around 2006. I am not the target audience for this thing, not even close. So take my reaction with whatever grain of salt that requires.
It's Blockly under the hood, which if you haven't touched it is basically Scratch's more corporate cousin, you snap together blocks that say things like "move forward," "turn right," "repeat 4 times," and it compiles down to something that moves Anna around the screen in a hexagon or a star. There's no typing. There's no syntax to get wrong, no missing semicolon, no console yelling at you in red. Fifteen minutes in I had drawn a snowflake and felt a genuinely tiny flicker of the same satisfaction I remember from my first "hello world," which surprised me more than it should have.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not a huge one: calling this "coding" stretches the word past where it's useful. Dragging labeled blocks into a sequence teaches you that computers follow ordered instructions and that loops save you repetition, and honestly that's a fine, real thing to learn. But it's not the same activity as staring at a blank .js file at 11pm trying to figure out why your for-loop is off by one. The Hour of Code branding leans hard on "anyone can learn to code in an hour," and I get why. It's a great hook for a PR campaign, and getting a ten-year-old comfortable with the idea that code is just instructions, not magic, matters. I just wish the messaging didn't blur the line quite so much between "you tried an intro exercise" and "you can code now." Those are different milestones and only one of them gets you hired.
What I did like, genuinely, is the framing choice. My cousin's kid is seven and obsessed with Frozen in the specific way that seven-year-olds get obsessed with things, meaning she has opinions about Kristoff's sled. I sat her down with it Tuesday afternoon (yes, on a school night, don't tell her mom I let her stay up) and she did four levels without asking me a single question, which never happens with anything I try to show her on a computer. That's the actual trick here, and it's a smart one: wrap a genuinely dry concept in a costume a kid already loves, and the medicine goes down easy. Code.org apparently also has a Star Wars version and a plain Minecraft-ish one if Frozen isn't your household's flavor of obsession this year.
Small aside because I can't not mention it: this is also the week the Sony hack story keeps growing new heads, unreleased movies leaking, executive emails getting picked apart on every gossip site that normally has nothing to do with tech. That's a whole separate post I'm not writing today, mostly because everyone else already is, but it's a weird split-screen kind of week: the same industry that's currently a punchline for security failures is also the one telling every third-grader in the country that coding is fun and approachable and safe. Both things are true at once, I guess.
Anyway. If you've got a kid, a niece, a nephew, a godchild, whoever, and twenty minutes to spare before the 14th, it's worth doing with them rather than just forwarding them the link. Watching someone figure out their first loop is a genuinely nice thing to watch happen, even if, especially if, you've forgotten what it felt like yourself.