President Obama Says Everyone Should Learn How to Hack

President Barack Obama kicked off Computer Science Education Week on Monday with a simple message: “Don’t just play on your phone. Program it.”

“Learning these skills isn’t just important for your future, it’s important for our country’s future,” Obama said in a YouTube video. “If we want America to stay on the cutting edge, we need young Americans like you to master the tools and technology that will change the way we do just about everything.”

The Computer Science Education Week is organized by Code.org, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding computer science education, along with Computing in the Core, a coalition of organizations that advocate computer science education. This year’s Computer Science Education Week is timed to coincide with the birthday of Grace Hopper, the United States Navy rear admiral who pioneered the field of computer science during and after World War II.

This year, Computer Science Education Week is pushing everyone to participate in a one-hour introduction to programming this week referred to as an “Hour of Code.” Any computer science teacher can create an Hour of Code tutorial, and the event organizers have provided a collection of tutorialsaimed at different age groups and experience levels.

The endeavor is reminiscent of the “Year of Code” campaign promoted in 2012 by programming tutorial company Codecademy, which culminated in New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeting that his New Year’s resolution was to learn to code. The campaign earned criticism from some programmers who think technical skills are being overemphasized.

“I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing,”Discourse co-founder and CTO Jeff Atwood wrote.

None the less, the code literacy movement has continued apace. Several companies are taking part the Hour of Code and Computer Science Education Week. Apple is hosting Hour of Code tutorials at its Apple Store retail locations, and Codecademy today launched an iPhone app for learning code on the go.

But the big question on everyone’s minds? Whether will Obama take his own advice and complete a programming tutorial today.[SOURCE]