15 Seconds With The Prez

That’s about how long Code.org founder Hadi Partovi had to tell President Obama about the nonprofit he started to teach kids computer code. What happened next is every nonprofit's dream. 

Hadi was invited to a reception at the White House and took the opportunity during a receiving line to tell the president about the 50 million kids who had already spent an hour learning how to code. He wanted him to kick off the next wave of learners and the President agreed. The commander-in-chief spent an hour on Monday learning how to code with middle school students from Newark, NJ, making him the first US president to write a computer program, including one line of JavaScript.

The event also kicked off a weeklong effort for 76,000 classrooms in 180 countries to participate in Hour of Code tutorials. The campaign has doubled in classroom participation from its first year, partly because the lessons have been translated into 30 languages. The Seattle-based organization is funded by individuals, foundations and corporations like Microsoft, Google and Salesforce. Hadi announced this week he had raised $20M in new funding for 2015-16 and will bring computer science to 25,000 new classrooms by September 2016.

Hadi, here with US CTO Megan Smith and middle school student Adriana Mitchell, says the idea for Code.org, launched in 2013, was inspired by his belief that kids should be learning to code on the same level as they learn math and American history. The push is to get computer coding as part of the regular K-12 curriculum. “Schools are going backwards in terms of teaching it,” he adds. Hadi had worked in technology and taught computer science at Harvard, while a student. His goal is to teach 1 million girls and 1 million African-American and Hispanic students a full introductory course in computer science.