Like most special days, #GoogleDoodle picked up a unique theme to celebrate 50 years of children's programming language.
On the golden jubilee of children learning to code, Google introduced its first-ever coding doodle by 'Coding for Carrots'.
As a part of the Computer Science Education Week, this never-seen-before doodle teaches how to code with the help of a furry friend
Google’s Doodle team tied up with Google Blocky team and even some researchers from MIT Scratch to come up with this fun doodle.
Champika Fernando one of the MIT projects collaborators explains why they did it:
“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."
For those of us who were born in the 1980’s, Computer Science as a subject may have sounded exciting when we were first introduced to the machines. But that excitement somehow drowned out because even in the early 90’s computer monitors at least here in India were still monochrome, expensive and added little value to our daily lives, not enough for us to even call them ‘practical’ in any way imagined.
Well, today’s Google Doodle is a good reminder of how the past is not exactly the past and how we need to change the way we learn to prepare for the future. Code is all around us and it’s high time we started educating kids about the same.
With that today’s Google Doodle is all about helping kids learn to code, by breaking it down in the simplest way possible, using carrots and a furry (not to mention) hungry little rabbit.
Google’s first coding doodle ever, is fairly simple for an adult to understand, but also makes sense to kids to help them build the foundations of what they will learn in the near future.
This week, millions of people around the world can and will have their first experience with coding. It makes me happy to think of all of the nine-year-olds who will get their first coding experience playing with today’s Doodle. My hope is that people will find this first experience appealing and engaging, and they’ll be encouraged to go further. In some ways, it’s very different from my first coding experience many years ago, but I hope it will be just as inspiring and influential for them.
Champika Fernando, Director of Communications, Scratch Team
