One million students have taken the computer science pledge on Code.org

Code.org tells us its Hour of Code movement has hit a big milestone: one million students have signed up to participate in Computer Science Education Week next month.

Hour of Code is an awareness campaign requiring one hour of a student’s (or a classroom’s) time. Through tutorials and offline materials, Code.org gives “a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify code and show that anyone can learn the basics to be a maker, a creator, an innovator.”

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Computer Science Education Week, which takes place December 9-15, 2013, includes many other events; Code.org’s Hour of Code just happens to bring a ton of fresh momentum to the lineup.

Here’s an overview of Code.org’s Hour of Code:

The event, writes a Code.org rep via email, is “on track to be the largest online education event in history, proving that the demand for relevant twenty-first century computer science education crosses all borders and knows no boundaries.”

The movement is about more than just tech literacy in general, however. It’s also, to a large degree, about creating equality in the tech community, starting with its youngest participants.

“Ninety percent of schools don’t even offer computer science, and those aren’t the schools with lots of white kids in great neighborhoods,” said Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

“Coding is the American Dream. If you want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or even want a high paying job, those jobs are for programmers. … And yet the opportunity to be exposed to that is going to the top 10 percent, and that is just morally wrong.”

Hadi will be speaking about this in great detail at DevBeat 2013, our first-ever developer conference coming up Nov. 12-13 in San Francisco. He and his brother and co-founder, Ali, will be offering their thoughts on comp sci education policy on the main stage, and they’ll be teaching a master class on teaching kids to code.

In general, DevBeat is a hands-on developer event packed with master classes, presentations, Q&As, and hackathons, all aimed at boosting your code skills, security knowledge, hardware hacking, and career development. You should register now — tickets are running low!

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