Guran

Obama becomes the first US president to write a computer program <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> President Barack Obama, to kick off the annual Computer Science Education Week, has become the first US president (at least as far as we know) to write a computer program. While this might not seem like a big deal, this will be seen as a glowing endorsement for the code literacy movement — a campaign that, for the last couple of years, has been extolling the virtues of teaching kids how to program. The question is, however, will learning how to program give the Coder in Chief (sorry) the necessary mental faculties — the fabled coder mindset — to corral a bitterly partisan Congress into ratifying some useful laws? Is fixing US politics just a matter of a well-placed for-next loop? As always, ExtremeTech will tackle one of the trickiest issues facing society head-on. Yesterday, at an event on the White House complex in Washington, President Obama sat down with middle-schooler Adrianna Mitchell and finished a very simple computer program. He made Elsa, from the film Frozen, walk in a straight line. Most reports say that Obama wrote a single line of JavaScript, but I think he did even less than that. From the video (below) it sounds like he’s doing stage three of the Code.org Frozen tutorial, where he simply has to drag a block (which represents a line of JavaScript code) into the “code editor.” In the interests of journalistic integrity, I actually completed the entire Frozen tutorial and didn’t have to write a single line of code. It’s possible that the Coder in Chief was given a special, extra-hard version of the tutorial — because, well, he’s the leader of the free world! — but I doubt it somehow. I should also point out that it’s entirely possible that Bill Clinton, or indeed any of the recent US presidents, might have also dabbled in programming in their spare time. Anyway, putting my cynicism aside for a moment, the concept behind Obama’s first program is a good one. Last year Obama gave a rousing speech (below) about the value of learning to code and computer science in general — and now he’s actually doing it. If the POTUS can take the time to code, and perhaps to develop a more logical, rational mindset as a result, then so can the nation’s kids.