A bunch of Brooklyn high school kids are learning to code.

Around 20 students from Achievement First University Prep High School travelled to Codeacademy‘s Chelsea office on Wednesday to participate in an Hour of Code. The event was held in the spirit of Computer Science Education Week, an annual initiative to get all those stinkin’ American schoolkids off Instagram and increase their interest in computer science.

Yup. Code, as in writing the language of computers. Remember HTML? I was self-taught. I remember my first flashing animated gif that I got to work…The code is still alive!!! My first website/blog… http://geocities.com/mvanpatten/mvp.html

Here is the code underlying that image…

Never mind the thousands of lines of code to create this page where it is displayed. I don’t do that… WordPress, the best blogging/content publishing system in the world (and it’s free) takes care of all of that – now. What used to be totally out of reach of the other 97% is now readily available.

HTML is pretty much kaput. It still works which is pretty amazing when you think how old technology becomes obsolete with every upgrade.

Why the big push to teach code? OK, OK, somebody’s got to do it, but coding isn’t as ubiquitious as typing. And even ten finger touch typing is being replaced by two-thumb typing.

You suppose those high schoolers are learning to code using their thumbs?

But please stand by for my attempt at coding a Christmas Greeting.

Welcome to our Hour of Code!: Pamela welcomes you to our programming community here. If YouTube is blocked for you and this video doesn’t load, just keep going!