It is an exciting week in the world of computer science education because December 7th through 11th, the entire Globe is celebrating Hour of Code!

“The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. Anyone, anywhere can organize an Hour of Code event. One-hour tutorials are available in over 40 languages. No experience needed. Ages 4 to 104.”

There are over 190,000 “Hour of Code” events happening internationally this week.

The students of CodeCraft’s first Cohort have spent nearly nine weeks mastering full-stack web-development practices and elected to use this opportunity to pass along their knowledge in the movement’s attempt to reach over 200M kids! That’s why our cohort and instructors created a JavaScript tutorial that explains how the game “Simon Says” is coded and functions as CodeCraft’s contribution to the “Hour of Code” movement.

Teachers can use the outlined plan to teach a one-hour lesson on coding or ambitious individuals can give it a go on their own. The app is targeted toward Junior High and High-School students but is a great introduction to JavaScript for anyone interested in enhancing their coding skills. It is available for public use here: http://codecraftschool.com/hourofcode/.

The tutorial covers basic concepts of JavaScript which is a programming language used to make web pages interactive. Its purpose is to help anyone get started with coding as it is designed for students with little or no experience. JavaScript runs on your computer and does not require constant downloads from your website in order to run.

The first two sections of the three-part lesson dive into the basics of CSS, HTML and JavaScript as well as simple code output examples and its corresponding JavaScript. The result here will be creating a web page!

Lesson three is where the fun really starts. Students learn how the programming concepts they learned in lessons one and two are used by a computer to operate the game “Simon Says.”

Using the “Simon Says” tutorial, students learn about JavaScript arrays, the differences between comments and statements, what exactly a function or conditional statement is and much more.

A huge shoutout goes to our instructors who helped lead the project, David Gray and Dallas Lones and the students who dedicated their day to it, Austin Johnson, Kelly Holshuh, Laura Baumgartner, Alex Naistadt and Chris Meese.