India’s Biggest The Hour of Code activity by goCODR
goCODR has just concluded India’s biggest “Hour of Code Activity” with 4870 students from 14 partners schools spanning 50 hours of coding and 10 days from Nov 15th to 25th. It was an enormous task no less than organising a rock concert especially for us an early stage edutech startup with a small team. But our big aspirations drove us through. You can read about why kids should learn coding here,and why India needs to push coding here.
About 2035 students completed their projects and created art design, coding exercises using sequential programming, for loop, while loop, if-else statement and more. Students made games such as flappy bird, basketball, art work and design, Minecraft exercises. Coding exercises involving Python, HTML, Javascript that is all the top programming languages for kids to create trivia games and more.
What is the Hour of Code?
The Hour of Code started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify “code”, to show that anybody can learn the basics, and to broaden participation in the field of computer science.
The Hour of Code is at its core not about learning a brand new skill in just one hour. One hour isn’t enough to learn how to code. It’s about increasing access to computer science by breaking stereotypes and opening doors. Somebody may learn programming concepts like loops, conditionals, or basic debugging through the Hour of Code. But a much more important goal is for students and teachers to learn that computer science is fun — you can start at any age, in any classroom, even if you don’t have a computer.
Post Activity Survey of participants
After India’s biggest The Hour of Code by goCODR was over each student was given a survey to fill to share their feedback on coding and their experience. We found the survey very insightful and we hope you will also find it useful.
Insight 1 – 95% of the participants responded that they have never done any form of coding in their lives. And The Hour of Code organised by goCODR was their first attempt at coding. We receive the same feedback wherever we go. Not more than 1-2% of students in a school in a metro have experienced coding. So whatever we have seen so far is not even tip of iceberg.
Insight 2 – 68% respondents admitted that they were totally scared of coding before the activity. They were totally anxious if they could do it. Most of them thought one needs to be an Einstein to even try it. We don’t blame them coding looks very intimidating from outside especially to children of parents who don’t have tech backgrounds.
But, within an hour of coding the perception changed drastically. After the activity only 9% said they are still afraid of coding while 91% responded they are now excited about the coding. Looks like what can change in one hour but it was one of the most liberating one hour for students. They no more fear coding, they don’t get intimidated by the idea of learning to code. What we saw on their faces after The Hour of Code was only excitement to code.
Insight 3 – 72% showed interest in continuing to learn coding. Now, this is what we think is biggest win of Hour of Code activity. It exposes children to an exciting new world of technology and development.
Insight 4 – 58% showed interest to explore technology and software development as a career option. Now this is big, imagine the quality of work force we would have in this country and competitive edge this will give to Indian companies at global level.
The best part of the activity for us is that most of the students did coding for the first time in their lives and majority of them were motivated enough to explore coding further down the line. One day hopefully some of these kids would be running big tech companies of the world. And when they would reflect back they would remember goCODR introduced them to coding.
Our promise is not to convert kids in to founders of billion dollar companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google or Facebook. Our promise is to introduce kids to coding and make them fall in love it and improving their logical reasoning, creativity, critical thinking, math skills. goCODR can help kids can become good coders at young age and then choose their own paths and carve their own destiny as they grow.
Write to us at school@gocodr.com if you want to learn more or want to organise “The Hour of Code” in your school, it’s free of cost. The Hour of Code is free cost online coding class for kids.
