Learning code easily with ‘Hour of Code’

The hour of code is a global initiative that helps to teach students about the importance of coding and programming in the current technology driven world. This movement wants to reach 100 million students from 8th – 14th December in over 180 countries. There is no age limit and there are no hard and fast rules. 77,411 Hour of Code events have taken place around the world and Bangladesh was not left behind.

Lets Learn Coding, a community organization, has conducted an Hour of Code event today at the United International University (UIU) auditorium. The session commenced at 11am and was attended by over 60 students who came from various universities including, United International University (UIU), Stanford University, UODA, IUBAT, etc.

Muhammad Sumon Molla Selim, founder of Lets Learn Coding, conducted the entire session and began the first hour by introducing the audience to what the Hour of Code is all about. He spoke about code.org – where it all began, and went on to share several statistics with the attendees. He informed that 60% of jobs currently available are in CSE, while only 2% students graduate from this discipline. Gender equality is also an issue with only 12% of women graduating in CSE. His speech revolved around creating awareness and inspiration amongst the enthusiastic crowd and he noted that 9 out of 10 schools do not teach Computer Science in their curriculum. He then went on to show a compelling video titled ‘Anybody Can Learn’ – which featured Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and other notable personalities.

After the hour long introductory session, the participants formed teams and began coding simple puzzles and problems. The puzzle solving was aimed to help them build logic. Teams worked with great interest and were at times mentored by Selim. Once they were done, the team which could solve the most problems in the shortest time span was asked to share their experience with the crowd.