# data[].attributes.body
I think coding is programming something to do another thing. Coding is important because it can help change the future.

# data[].attributes.body
Coding is a way for you to learn.

It is important because the more you learn the more you know.

# data[].attributes.body
I'm not really sure what coding is but, my guess is that coding is when you are when you are decoding some thing or programming something. I think it's important to learn because you can help people with their own computer

# data[].attributes.body
I think coding means a program or programming.I think It is Important because if you don't know how you could get a job and be mindless when doing it.

# data[].attributes.body
Coding is programming.

It is important incase someone hacks you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For some kids, Saturday morning is a time for cartoon-watching.

However, for a few Seattle-area youngsters, those hours typically reserved for the tube have turned into time spent learning how to code.

It's all thanks to the CoderDojo program, a non-profit networks of clubs around the world founded in Ireland two years ago that now teaches 10,000 kids every week.

In September, the Microsoft Store in University Village hosted the first-ever Seattle CoderDojo. It was organized by Greg Bulmash, a Microsoft content developer who also happens to have a fourth-grade son in need of computer skills.

Looking for a place that could help his child learn how to code, Bulmash came upon CoderDojo. When he found out Seattle didn't have a club, well, Bulmash started one.

"I wanted something like this for my oldest son - and my younger one when he gets old enough," he said. "No one else seemed to be doing it. I found a niche I wanted filled and started filling it."

That first meeting in September drew about 20 kids and three volunteers. Since then, though, interest has grown as the group found a bigger space at Amazon's South Lake Union headquarters. There are now 60-to-70 kids coming together every Saturday with more than 30 adult volunteers each week - and yes, there's a waitlist.

The two-hour meetups typically start off with greetings and announcements and then move into something Bulmash calls the "Sorting Hat," stage, where kids are grouped by skill and experience. From there, children start on a project or lesson for the day.

"For a lot of the kids, it's like a weekly Hour of Code experience," Bulmash explained. "But we also get in students who are more advanced and are working on projects for their own interests or for classes. In those cases, we try to provide a mentor who is experienced in that type of work to help them move forward."

Bulmash said he's seen all sorts of adults bring their kids to CoderDojo: Geek parents who work in technology, home-schoolers, random parents who heard about it from a friend, etc.

Kids are expected to bring their own device, which Bulmash admits limits students who don't have access to a laptop.

"Eventually we hope to do some outreach across the technology gap, but right now it's been three-and-a-half months since our first meeting," he said. "We're still figuring a lot of stuff out, recruiting partners, and building our internal infrastructure."

The classes are free and CoderDojo is supported by its sponsors. The Seattle club hopes to expand its leadership in 2014 and organize a formal committee that can make the program more scalable. There's also a "ParentDojo," in the works designed to help parents understand what their kids are doing and support their learning.

There's clearly an interest in Seattle CoderDojo thus far, and Bulmash only wants to see that grow.

"In a few years I'd like to see Seattle CoderDojo able to serve a few hundred kids each weekend with a few different regional meetups - Eastside, Downtown, South King, South Snohomish - running in concert on Saturday mornings," he said. "The demand is there. It's a matter of building the infrastructure and awareness."

Find out more and sign up for Seattle CoderDojo meetups here.

What's next for the innovation economy?

Find out at The GeekWire Summit, taking place on Oct. 1-3, 2018 in Seattle, one of the country's premier technology conferences, bringing together more than 900 innovators and tech leaders together for an immersive two-day conference.

This year's lineup features the CEO's of Boeing, The Gates Foundation, Ring, eBay and more. Early bird rates end soon, grab your tickets today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Seattle CoderDojo: Free weekly weekend meetups teach your kid how to code

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For some kids, Saturday morning is a time for cartoon-watching. However, for a few Seattle-area youngsters, those hours typically reserved for the tube have turned into time spent learning how to code. It's all thanks to the CoderDojo program, a non-profit networks of clubs around the world founded in Ireland two years ago that now teaches 10,000 kids every week.

# data[].attributes.body
Coding is like when you can program or control something. It is important to code because if you need to do something. Like making a combo of things or maybe build a thing for a job you have. But if you can't code you might not be able to do the things you need.

# data[].attributes.body
I think it's like getting into passcodes.i think its important because it keeps your privacy safe.

# data[].attributes.body
I think coding is important because it lets you pass levels and control something to get pass the levels.I think coding means controlling something to get past levels.

# data[].attributes.body
Coding is when you program something to do something you what it to do. It can do anything you want with it. Learning code is important because there is many jobs that you can use it for, you can also make your own videos. If you make it on your own people will be very impressed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hour Of Code, Dec 8th, Dec 10th, and Dec 12th After School | Mr. Eliot's Website

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
YLHS will be having two Hour Of Code events this year. Our Mobile App class will be having an event Monday December 8th after school. AP Computer Science will have an event after school on Wednesday December 10th and Friday December 12th.

# data[].attributes.body
I think coding is when you program something to do a certain thing. It is important because if you don't want anybody to hack on to your computer than you can put a program to shield your computer. So that's why I think coding is programming.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Opinion

WHEN I was 7 years old, I knew the capitals of most major countries and their currencies. I had to, if I wanted to track down a devious criminal mastermind in the computer game "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" On screen, the ACME Detective Agency would spit out clues like notable landmarks to help players identify the city where Carmen's globe-trotting henchmen were hiding out. I wouldn't learn how to pronounce Reykjavik for more than a decade, but I could tell you that its currency was called the krona.

I was the child of Indian immigrants, and like any begrudging Bengal tiger cub, I penciled in fill-in-the-blank maps and memorized multiplication tables after dinner. I was much more motivated to learn about geography by chasing Carmen Sandiego on the family Macintosh Plus. I couldn't confidently point to Iceland on a map. But I did become a technology reporter.

A huge nationwide push is underway, funded by the nonprofit Code.org's corporate and billionaire donors, from Amazon and Google to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, to introduce American schoolchildren to coding and to redefine it as a basic skill to be learned alongside the three R's. Code.org's curriculum has been adopted by 20,000 teachers from kindergarten to 12th grade.

But if coding is the new lingua franca, literacy rates for girls are dropping: Last year, girls made up 18.5 percent of A.P. computer science test-takers nationwide, a slight decrease from the year before. In three states, no girls took the test at all. An abysmal 0.4 percent of girls entering college intend to major in computer science. And in 2013, women made up 14 percent of all computer science graduates - down from 36 percent in 1984.

The imbalance persists in the tech industry. Just this week, Google released data showing that women account for just 17 percent of its tech employees. The problem is not only getting girls to computer class, but keeping them there.

Natalie Rusk is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who helped develop Scratch, an open-source programming platform where kids can code games and animation and then share projects and how-to tips. She thinks the next two years will determine whether coding can start to close the gender gap. "One of the key reasons to broaden participation is to get more diversity of who is designing these technologies," she said. "It's being presented as, 'Learn how to program,' " she said, "but not, 'What do you want to program? What's your idea?' "

So what if, instead of trying to guess at what might get girls interested in technology, we looked at what's already on their screens? While parents often worry about recreational "screen time," some educators now believe that gaming could be a way to get girls interested in coding, and even to increase the numbers of girls in STEM - science, technology, engineering and math - classes and schools. Reshma Saujani, founder of the nonprofit organization Girls Who Code, said, "We have to meet them where they are."

"Students kept walking in asking to learn how to code wearing Minecraft T-shirts,'" said Stephen Foster, a founder of the San Diego-based organization ThoughtSTEM, which teaches kids ages 8 to 18 to code in after-school programs and summer camps. "Once it happened the 20th time, we started to realize, 'Oh, hey, maybe these kids know something that we don't.' "

Minecraft, from the Swedish game developer Mojang, looks like a 3-D fairy tale that was cranked through the Matrix and came out rendered in blocks. Players can use modifications or "mods" written in Java and can build mods of their own design. You can play in "survival" mode - battling "creepers" and zombies - or "creative" mode, in which you build anything from a house to a village to a fantasy world. The latter seems to be especially appealing to girls.

Code.org, despite millions in funding and a push from President Obama, is not yet mainstream. Minecraft, however, is. Lady Gaga released a Minecraft-themed music video in March and "The Simpsons" riffed on the game in the credits of an episode in April. Minecraft has 100 million registered users; spend any time around elementary- and middle-school kids and you'll see that it has cornered the market.

"We're happy about the Minecraft phenomenon because it is just about creating," said Dr. Rusk of M.I.T. "First it seemed like it was mostly boys, but now a lot of girls are getting engaged in Minecraft."

Image

Credit Pippin Barr

A hundred students were on ThoughtSTEM's waiting list for its first Minecraft class two months ago. "I would say that the girls are actually outperforming the boys, at least in my class," Mr. Foster said. "And it's very good to see, because as computer scientists, we definitely recognize that there's a big gender disparity in our field." He added, "There are just so many girls who play Minecraft who, as far as I'm concerned, are all people who can be swayed to pursue coding - they just don't realize it yet."

Kimberly Bryant, who spent a decade as an engineer in biotechnology, is the founder of the educational nonprofit Black Girls Code. Gaming has evolved into one of what Ms. Bryant calls the "core pillars" of Black Girls Code. "We find that it taps into every element of coding necessary to be a technologist," she said. "You have the design, basic computational skills, math." She favors gaming platforms and languages that are designed to teach coding, like Scratch, Alice and a new platform called Beta.

To avoid perpetuating the tech industry's glaring gender gap, schools should look more closely at these grass-roots initiatives that have had success in attracting and inspiring girls. One X factor seems to be the presence of female role models, which can be hard to come by when you're one of the only girls in your computer science class. Girls know the stereotype of a geeky guy hacker in his basement all too well, and interacting with women who use computer science in their professional lives gives them an idea of something to go after besides an endless string of code. Many of the instructors, coding evangelists and students I spoke with credited a female mentor who nudged them along.

Rebecca Feldman, a seventh grader from Queens, had a discouraging experience in a robotics after-school program. "I was one of two girls in the class," she said. "We kind of had to fend for ourselves." Then her parents heard about CoderDojo, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching kids to code free of charge.

CoderDojo NYC, which has a 50/50 split of girls and boys and is ethnically diverse, was co-founded by Rebecca Garcia, a 23-year-old programmer who gravitated toward coding through an early obsession with NeoPets, an online game popular with girls that lets players customize their pet shops using the languages HTML and CSS.

Rebecca Feldman was mentored by Ms. Garcia - "a cool adult I could go to for help" - and became known as Little Rebecca. One of her projects is a website about tomboys. "Her parents told me she had never heard of computer science before," Ms. Garcia recalled. But after the very first session, she told her parents, "I really like this. Is this something you can do for a living?"

The co-editor of Valleywag, Gawker's blog about the technology industry.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Opinion WHEN I was 7 years old, I knew the capitals of most major countries and their currencies. I had to, if I wanted to track down a devious criminal mastermind in the computer game "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?"

# data[].attributes.body
Coding is to program something.

Are to like move around a board.Coding is important because it is able to let do certain things on electronics ect.

# data[].attributes.body
Coding is a program.

Coding is important because you are trying to find out how to pass a level, and you get smarter and the more you do it the more you know

# data[].attributes.body
Coding is something were you can program Legos, or making robots move.

# data[].attributes.body
I think coding is like a program or programming.coding is important because if we didn't have coding we couldn't program stuff

# data[].attributes.body
Coding is programming something with technology and creating something that you can use like video games or websites. It is important to learn how to code so later in the future you can use coding to create something on the Internet.

# data[].attributes.body
To code means to problem solve and think out of the box. Learning to code is important because you use coding throughout your life.

# data[].attributes.body
Coding is when someone is programming a game or computer site. It is important to learn to code because otherwise you will never be able to create an app or computer site. That is what I think coding is.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ES-Art Journeys-June 1- from 5:30-7:30pm-EC + ES Artwork on display!

# data[].attributes.body
Coding