Celebrating 50 years of Kids Coding @codeorg #HourOfCode

Last year the daily Google Doodle featured the first ever coding doodle during computer science education week, Champika Fernando shared the backstory on the programmable doodle, Via GOOGLE

Today, during Computer Science Education Week, we celebrate 50 years since kids programming languages were first introduced to the world with a very special creation (and furry friend): our first ever kids focused coding Google Doodle! Today’s Doodle was developed through the close teamwork of not one or two but THREE teams: the Google Doodle team, Google Blockly team, and researchers from MIT Scratch!

To learn more about the history and importance of kids coding languages, we invited Champika Fernando, one of the project’s most passionate collaborators at MIT, to share her thoughts:

My first experience with coding was in a free after-school program back in the eighties when I was nine years old. We programmed a little green turtle to move around and draw lines on a black screen. That programming language was called Logo.

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With today’s Doodle — the first coding Doodle ever — we celebrate fifty years of coding languages for kids by “Coding for Carrots.” In the interactive Doodle, you program and help a furry friend across 6 levels in a quest to gather its favorite food by snapping together coding blocks based on the Scratch programming language for kids.

Learn more and check out these resources to assist in teaching one Hour of Code with the coding kids in your life!