National Coding Week Starts Today

September 14th through the 20th is National Coding Week, a time for everyone to familiarize  with coding by becoming more digitally literate through classes and engagement. With the world of today growing more and more reliant on technology, it’s important for us all to become familiar with the basics of what makes our systems run.

According to an article from nationaltoday.com, “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.” Coding often seems like a challenging and daunting activity, but National Coding Week is a time committed to making the skill easy and accessible.

The concept of National Coding Week was founded in the United Kingdom by former headteacher Richard Rolfe and tech entrepreneur Jordan Love. National Today says that the week-long holiday was “intend[ed] to help adults improve their digital literacy to fill the growing skills gap in the country.”

Coding itself has a rich history, with its roots set by a British countess named Ada Lovelace, who is widely regarded as the first computer programmer. Considering the many computer concepts she invented in the 1840s, as well as the prediction that computers would one day be able to play music and board games, it’s no wonder later programmers named one of the first programming languages “Ada” after her.

With this origin, National Coding Week especially encourages female involvement, highlighting women involved in public digital projects in order to close the gender divide in technology.

One program widely recognized by those who celebrate National Coding Week is known as the “Hour of Code.” This program acts as a valuable resource for those who wish to pursue a career in computer science, but have not yet experienced coding. According to the Hour of Code's website, the program “started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify ‘code,’ to show that anybody can learn the basics… [and] has since become a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities but expanding to all sorts of community efforts.”

Though the Hour of Code usually takes place during December’s Computer Science Education Week, anyone can host an Hour of Code event at any time during the year. This makes National Coding Week a prime opportunity for those studying programming to use the Hour of Code to introduce coding to friends and family who aren’t familiar with coding.

Capitol Tech offers many programs in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science that all deal with the invaluable coding languages of today. Programming courses are offered in Python, Java, C, C++, and app development languages Objective C and xcode.

To learn about these opportunities, click here or contact the university’s admissions department by emailing admissions@captechu.edu.