On Saturday, December 7th, about 100 Future Programmers gathered at ServiceNow's San Diego offices for 2 hours of hands-on Programming Education as a part of Computer Science Education Week promoted by President Obama (as reported in Wired Magazine) .
Except they didn't know it.
They were too busy having fun making a web based game using MIT's Scratch Programming Language. The event was led by two students, Brenden Owen (14) and Braydon Owen (11) who took a project based approach to teaching the students how to program a game that simulated a fundraising effort and drilling a well for Charity:Water (DISCLAIMER ALERT: the student-teachers are related to this proud blogger). Scratch provides a free, web-based development environment so the students could instantly share their projects online and continue to program from home. Some parents reported that their students spent the rest of the weekend on the computer - except this weekend they were not playing games, they were making them. To check out some of the students' work, visit the Scratch Website here.
As a part of giving back for the holidays, ServiceNow hosted this event as a fund-raiser and raised over $1,100 for charity, including Charity:Water which inspired the programming project. To learn more information about future events and sign up on the interest list to be notified, visit http://www.sparkprogramming.org
