What is Learn to Code?

Learn to Code is an initiative for providing computer science education to everyone.

In 2015, when I was working with Microsoft, I got an opportunity to volunteer with TEALS to teach Introduction to Computer Science to high school students. I enjoyed doing to it so much that it became the most enjoyable part of my day soon. I looked forward to it every day.

I wanted to continue it for the following years as well, but couldn’t do that since I had switched jobs and the travel schedule for my new job was crazy. It pretty much meant that I would leave home at 7 AM and come back by 8 PM. Within few months of leaving Microsoft, I was even contacted by many friends of mine who wanted to enter IT industry and felt intimated by the time and cost commitment it required.

My goal with this blog series to make the concepts of computer science available and understandable to all. I have a roadmap of the blogs that I want to do to but I will start with Learn to Code series, for which the main idea will be to cover the coding basics and enabling people from all walks of the life to be able to code.

Learning to code in itself can be intimidating and learning a programming language on top of it is another big thing. As a first step in this effort (or consider it part 1), I am going to cover the concepts that are covered in a typical ‘Introduction to Computer Science’ course. And since I don’t want the programming language to be an inhibitor, I will use SNAP! for the Introduction to Computer series. I used SNAP! while teaching for TEALS as well, and I loved its simple drag-and-drop visual interface.

In the future series, I will go to a text based programming language.