Does your kid know what a Software Engineer does?

I met a Software Engineer the other day who said his major was Math in college, but that he wanted to be part of what was happening here in San Francisco - the new Silicon Valley.  San Francisco is a mecca for start-ups, they are all here.  Software engineers (coders) write the programs (code) for all the apps we have on our phones, for Facebook, for Twitter, for Instagram, for Luminosity, for Bill.com, for Square, for DropBox, for Uber, etc., etc., etc.... 

Computer Science is the best paying college degree in the U.S.  Image courtesy of Code.org

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey all recently supported Code.org’s video “What Most Schools Don’t Teach.” The clip stresses a growing worldwide shortage of coders, and that only 10% of American schools teach any kind of programming. 

Code.org is a “non-profit whose goal is to expose all students to computer programming. We believe that computer programming is a liberal art; it's something EVERY student in the world should be exposed to at some point in their childhood.”

Code.org offers options straight from its homepage for students to start learning code, or for teachers to start bringing code to their schools. The amount of resources available for FREE to learn code are vast and overwhelming. Who needs college? Bill Gates didn’t!

Code.org’s online learning options include Scratch where you work on some lines of code in a left pane, and see the results on the right. Also offered are links to sites where you can learn coding online. At Code Academy, you can learn to code for free. Khan Academy’s “resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.”
Code.org offers links to apps to teach kids coding set within games for Android with apps like LightBot, RoboLogic for IOS, or Kodu for Windows, and even xBox. Other online tutorials affiliated with Code.org include Lynda.com and Udemy. Lynda.com offers thousands of online courses and tutorials and offers programming tutorials on core languages like Java, C#, and HTML5. Universities are affiliated with Code.org as well. Coursera offers “free full university courses online taught by real professors.” You’ll also find resources to learn web programming, mobile app programming, and even resources to write code for robots!
So that you know where to go, what should you learn? Well, you’ll need to hone your math and basic computer science skills. When you work up to it, what programming languages should you be learning?

Jobstractor.com did an overview of the most sought after programming languages.
Here they are in order:

PHP
Java
Objective C
SQL
Android (Java)
Ruby
JavaScript
C#
C++
ActionScript
Python
C
ASP.NET

Well…what are you waitin’ for? We gave you the links. Most of the courses are FREE. We even gave you a list of what to learn. So, get out there and start learnin’ some code. Make Mr. Gates and Mr. Zuckerberg happy and maybe you’ll enter the world of all night hackathons, high paychecks, no sleep and free lunches! Good luck!

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