Code.org

Code.org is a little different to codecademy.com. Code.org has a definate direction to be child friendly. take a read of their Wikipedia pages to explain why.

From Wikipedia:
Code.org is a non-profit organization and eponymous website led by brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi that aims to encourage people, particularly school students in the United States, to learn to code. The website includes free coding lessons, and the initiative also targets schools in an attempt to encourage them to include more computer science classes in the curriculum. On December 9, 2013, they launched the Hour of Code 2013 challenge nationwide to promote computer science during computer science week until December 15, 2013.

Goals

According to its website, Code.org has the following goals:

• Bringing Computer Science classes to every K-12 school in the United States, especially in urban and rural neighborhoods.
• Demonstrating the successful use of online curriculum in public school classrooms
• Changing policies in all 50 states to categorize C.S. as part of the math/science "core" curriculum
• Harnessing the collective power of the tech community to celebrate and grow C.S. education worldwide
• Increasing the representation of women and students of color in the field of Computer Science.

This website reminds me a little of The Raspberry Pi Foundation. For those who don't know ( if you don't know Why dont you! call yourself interested in computers!) check out the link above for more info but in short two guys set up a charity to create a small, cheap computer ( $35 US dollars (although a British charity I'd like to add) and the size of a credit card.) for kids to learn to code on in school or at home.

Anyway about Code.org, I feel this is what Hadi and Ali are trying to achieve also by providing this site. Basic tutorial in coding, moving a "special" (more to come) character around to achieve by placing blocks of code with certain direction on them. Very similar to Scratch if you ever had a go with it, placing blocks with if or else and move forward until etc etc. I recommend people to try it out and again its free!  Worth trying out.

This is the first page your greeted with, video for information and the invite to start an hour of code. As you can see from the picture, the likes of Ashton Kutcher (Hollywood Actor ), Mark Zuckerberg ( 1 of the 4 creators of Facebook ), Bill Gates ( creator of Microsoft ) plus others. That some wait, some high profile names in and out of the world of computer science. To top that off your use an angry bird from well Angry Birds obviously and a zombie from Plants vs Zombies i believe its called.

I'm going to leave my review here and let you decide, this site is basic but its fun. I enjoyed but to start with you won't learn to program your own programme/software or what ever for a while. Some thing I did find very cool though was this.

I think that is brillant for completing the Hour of Code!

Thanks for Reading!