{"id":5439,"date":"2014-12-15T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2014-12-15T12:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5439"},"modified":"2014-12-14T23:47:28","modified_gmt":"2014-12-14T23:47:28","slug":"moving-on-from-an-hourofcode-to-20-hours-of-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2014\/12\/moving-on-from-an-hourofcode-to-20-hours-of-code.htm","title":{"rendered":"Moving on from an #HourOfCode to 20 hours of code…"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Hour of Code events<\/a> that are running as part of Computer Science Education Week<\/a>\u00a0and, last Thursday, I took my 10 year-old son to our local\u00a0Apple Store to take part in an event. Unfortunately his younger brother wasn’t interested (“I don’t really like programming” was the response) but I’m not going to push it –\u00a0not everyone likes the same things and I do at least know he’ll be exposed to some coding at school (Scratch was part of the ICT curriculum at their school, even before the recent shake-up in computer science education here in the UK).<\/p>\n

Using a Scratch-like user interface, the Hour of Code\u00a0used a sequence of puzzles to guide Angry Birds through a route to find some pigs, the Zombies and Plants, and Squirrels and Acorns… with the opportunity to view the resulting JavaScript code at each stage. \u00a0Working up from simple steps forward\/turns to repeat [for] loops, repeat until [while] loops, if statements and if\/else statements it was great to see my son asking “what are all the funny brackets” when he viewed the code (and equally great to be able to use some of the C he’s tweaked with the Arduino as an example of passing parameters).<\/p>\n

#HourOfCode<\/a> at the Milton Keynes Apple Store earlier… (free Apple earphones too…) pic.twitter.com\/Mv6riUixLD<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) December 11, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n