It is time for National Coding Week 2022! During the week of September 14-20, it’s a good time to wear your coding hat and sharpen some digital literacy skills in a fun and engaging way. By gaining more knowledge about coding and digital skills helps everyone make sense of the rapidly changing world around us. Get inspired by the development of coding, explore new ideas and innovate for the future starting today!
HISTORY OF NATIONAL CODING WEEK
The idea of National Coding Week began in the UK, founded by former headteacher Richard Rolfe and tech entrepreneur Jordan Love, who was appointed EU Code Week Ambassador for the UK. The first National Coding Week took place during the week of September 21, 2014. The purpose was to help adults improve their digital literacy and related skills to fill the growing skills gaps. From that point on, the National Coding Week has spread to many different countries, including the United States.
But what is coding, and why is it important? Coding is the process of using a programming language to get a computer to behave the way we want it to. Every line of code tells our machines to do something. A document full of lines is called a script, which is designed to carry out a specific job on the computer.
As we are increasingly moving into a globalized and online world, learning new skills such as coding can open new doors to people. Having coding skills will also allow both young people and adults to better understand today’s evolving digital world and capture potential opportunities in both future career and life.
Learning new skills, especially something like coding, can be an intimidating project. So during National Coding Week, it is a good time to people understand coding, understand the importance of coding, and getting more comfortable with coding.
NATIONAL CODING WEEK ACTIVITIES
1. Sign up for coding classes
Signing up for a coding class is a great way to celebrate National Coding Week. After all, it is a week to tryout and learn about coding. There are tremendous number of resources online for signing up that are suitable for both beginners and more experienced coders, many are even free! Learning coding skills can help professionals advance in their current career even if they don’t work in tech. So don’t worry even if you are not in tech or have no prior knowledge about coding, just pick a course and start learning and celebrating!
2. Participate in the Digital Skills Challenge
You can also participate in digital skills challenges throughout the week. These are challenges that allow participants to test their current coding skills and build new areas of expertise. These digital skills challenges can be found online through different participating organizations and on social media through National Coding Week-related hashtags such as #nationalcodingweek
3. Learn About Exceptional Coders
A great way to celebrate National Coding Week is to learn about exceptional coders and coding history. There have been incredible programmers in American history who made it what it is today. In this week, you can research people who have made significant contributions to the tech field and coding. Learn about coders such as Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, an American computer scientist who created the C programming language which shaped today’s digital era; or Ada Lovelace, who introduced many computer concepts during the 1840s and is generally considered the first computer programmer.
4. Join a Coding Club
Joining a coding club is a good way for beginners to find a community of coders. Coding clubs typically group members together by experience level and help participants gain new skills through hands-on projects and webinars. For beginners, celebrate National Coding Week by finding and joining a coding club of your interest, and start learning today.
5. Showcase Your Work via Social Media
For our tech professionals, National Coding Week is also the perfect time for you to showcase your technical projects. Displaying finished work — or even works in progress — can demonstrate your progress in developing tech skills and inspire others to learn new skills as well.
6. Support or Join Your Local Hackathon
Just in case you never heard of it, a hackathon is a sprint-like design event where computer programmers and others involved in software development, gather together and collaborate intensively on software projects. The goal of a hackathon is to create functioning software or hardware by the end of the event. For programmers who have a developed strong skillset can enter a local hackathon individually or with friends, as a way to sharpen skills and celebrate the National Coding Week.
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