Obama becomes the first US president to write a computer program

President Barack Obama, to kick off the annual Computer Science Education Week, has become the first US president (at least as far as we know) to write a computer program. While this might not seem like a big deal, this will be seen as a glowing endorsement for the code literacy movement — a campaign that, for the last couple of years, has been extolling the virtues of teaching kids how to program. The question is, however, will learning how to program give the Coder in Chief (sorry) the necessary mental faculties — the fabled coder mindset — to corral a bitterly partisan Congress into ratifying some useful laws? Is fixing US politics just a matter of a well-placed for-next loop? As always, ExtremeTech will tackle one of the trickiest issues facing society head-on.

Yesterday, at an event on the White House complex in Washington, President Obama sat down with middle-schooler Adrianna Mitchell and finished a very simple computer program. He made Elsa, from the film Frozen, walk in a straight line. Most reports say that Obama wrote a single line of JavaScript, but I think he did even less than that. From the video (below) it sounds like he’s doing stage three of the Code.org Frozen tutorial, where he simply has to drag a block (which represents a line of JavaScript code) into the “code editor.”

In the interests of journalistic integrity, I actually completed the entire Frozen tutorial and didn’t have to write a single line of code. It’s possible that the Coder in Chief was given a special, extra-hard version of the tutorial — because, well, he’s the leader of the free world! — but I doubt it somehow. I should also point out that it’s entirely possible that Bill Clinton, or indeed any of the recent US presidents, might have also dabbled in programming in their spare time.

Anyway, putting my cynicism aside for a moment, the concept behind Obama’s first program is a good one. Last year Obama gave a rousing speech (below) about the value of learning to code and computer science in general — and now he’s actually doing it. If the POTUS can take the time to code, and perhaps to develop a more logical, rational mindset as a result, then so can the nation’s kids.

Over the last few years, there has been a big drive to bring more kids into the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Organizations such as Code.org, CodeAcademy, Khan Academy, and so on, have all lowered the barrier to entry significantly — and I’m sure there are now more kids who are interested in technical fields as a result. The Raspberry Pi was created for much the same reason: To get kids in the UK thinking about electronics and programming from an early age. In both cases, the UK and US are worried that, unless we foster a new generation of lateral thinkers, we might lose our technological and engineering edge over China, India, and other developing countries that are rapidly picking up steam. (You could easily argue that China already has a big lead in terms of engineering, but the US is probably still safe in science and technology for a few more years.)

Politics aside, I don’t think the code literacy movement is a bad thing. Personally, I think learning to code at a young age probably played quite a big role in my development into a strangely logical and rational teenager. It’s important to remember that coding — just like any other activity — isn’t for everyone. Much like we shouldn’t force kids to play football, enforced programming is probably not a great idea either. Kids should certainly be encouraged to code — and computer science (or another STEM subject) should certainly be on the curriculum — but we shouldn’t assume that coding is some kind of international panacea. (Though it would be fun if JavaScript became the world’s lingua franca…)