Hour Of Code Is Here Again!

Tomorrow is the start of Computer Science Education Week, which also brings with it Hour Of Code. I've been coding professionally for almost 2 decades, but I got my start at a much younger age. I was fortunate. My Dad was always slightly a technophile, so my brother and I always had access to the gadgety stuff of the late 70s and early 80s. And when the Commodore 64 came out in 1982, my Dad had to have one. I loved that machine, and in fact it still sits in my garage (waiting for me to figure out that I should plug it back in somewhere). That machine, alone, likely affected both of his son's futures much more than he ever thought it would (my sister was born slightly before the C64, so was probably too young to see the full potential; she's great at Nintendo, but not a full geek like her brothers).

Load "Deadline", 8,1

But I digress.... Between the C64 and Family Computing Magazine, I taught myself BASIC. I became a wanna-be geek. My Mom said I should be a computer programmer. I wanted to be a pilot. So I became a pilot. But then decided I wanted to be a computer programmer. Listening to Mom is probably smart.

I was fortunate that I had people in my household that were able to support my fledgling geekism. Computers have changed a WHOLE lot in the decades since Copy/Paste was "look at the magazine text and type that into the console".  I look at initiatives like Code.org, and I see the possibilities that I did when I was a kid. We've reached a point in our history where computers are involved in pretty much everything we do. There are even LIGHT BULBS that can be programmed to do something other than provide white light to a room. Look around and you'll probably see a vast majority of people on a cell phone or browsing the internet on some device. For my entire life, Moore's Law has held true.

AI is scary-smart, but we still need people to program both the internet and that scary-smart AI that will be writing itself all too soon. I think Hour Of Code does a fantastic job of encouraging kids to see the possibilities of what they can do. So, as they say, "What will you create?".