Code.org has come up with a short film with biggies of the tech world encouraging kids to code.
Code.org is a non-profit organization that aims to encourage coding among young kids.They recently shot a short film directed by documentarian Lesley Chilcott, which had entrepreneurs like Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft's Bill Gates, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey encourage kids to take up coding from a young age.
"A lot of the coding that people do is actually fairly simple," Makinde Adeagbo, an early Facebook engineer, said in the video. "It's more about the process of breaking down problems than coming up with complicated algorithms, as people traditionally think about it."
Dropbox creator Drew Houston called learning to code similar to learning to play a sport or an instrument. He said first you need to be intrigued by it and then slowly you get the hang of it and then you're hooked to it.
"When I was in school, I was in this after-school group called the Whiz Kids," Miami Heat center Chris Bosh said in the film. "When people found out, they laughed at me, you know all these things. I'm like, 'I don't care, I think it's cool, I'm learning a lot and some of my friends have jobs."
Black Eyed Peas member will.i.am also admitted that he was hooked on to coding after he got the hang of it.
"Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find," Zuckerberg said. "The whole limit in the system is just that there just aren't enough people that are trained and have these skills today."
According to the film, one million of the best jobs in America may go unfilled because only one in 10 schools actually teach students how to code. Code.org points to a state of unbalanced opportunity, when, by 2020, there will be 1 million more jobs than students who can fill them, despite the notion that computer science is among the highest-paid college degrees.
Watch the film below:
