Eleven Lincoln Middle School teachers led their students through coding lessons during the Computer Science Education Week that ran from Dec. 7 to Dec. 13. The teachers used special tools and techniques developed to fit into an “Hour of Code.” The students at Lincoln did not work in a vacuum. This year some 200,000 educators in more than 180 countries participated in the program. 

Twin brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi started this educational hour just three years ago. They introduced Code.org to the world in January 2013. The brothers wanted to get every school in the United States to teach computer programming. They came up with a plan and the following December they put the “Hour of Code Challenge” on their website. 

They hoped to reach out to students with a one-hour introduction to computer science, especially designed to demystify code and show that everyone can learn the basics. 

In the first two years alone, some 100 million people logged on to Code.org and took lessons. 
Hadi got the second installment of “Hour of Code” going in 2014 by teaching President Barack Obama to write a single line of JavaScript, and “moveForward(100);” remains the only line of computer code ever written by a U.S. President.

“Computer science is about starting small, learning how to tell the computer to do the simplest, easiest thing and then building from there. It all starts with a first line of code,” Hadi said.