When I was in second grade I decided that I wanted to make video games when I grew up. When I told my best friend and next door neighbor, he decided to show me a game that he had built using Object Pascal (a relevant, but comparatively archaic language). You played as a monkey on a building throwing bananas at another monkey across the screen. It was awful, and I was inspired. Over the next few weeks I programmed my own text-based game where you had a conversation with and told jokes to your computer. It was a simple program, but it took me a long time to iron out the kinks. I had an inadequate knowledge-base and a dense, 5-pound manual to help me out when I needed to correct my syntax.
Ever since that initial experience I’ve wanted to learn more about coding; there weren’t many resources to aid me, and so I was necessarily self-taught. Today, the computer sciences and specifically coding are becoming more of a priority in the education of young people, and that’s a great thing. I can personally attest to the fact that if you familiarize a young person with some coding basics, learning how to program will over time become intuitive with practice, like advancing from basic arithmetic to algebra. For beginners, the initial concepts are the hardest to grasp: the structure of functions, and how a program flows. Microsoft has partnered with Code.org to create engaging, intuitive tutorials set in the world of Minecraft to teach kids these elementary concepts as part of their third annual Hour of Code campaign. To learn more about the Hour of Code, or to start learning yourself, you can check out the FAQ here .