Disney to join effort to get kids into the coding game

The non-profit group Code.org on Tuesday said that it will team up with Disney and Lucasfilm to create Frozen- and Star Wars-themed computer science courses for children, part of a free, 80-hour computer science course that will be integrated into the group’s curriculum over the next year.

In 2014, Code.org’s much shorter “Hour of Code” animation tutorial featured Anna and Elsa from Frozen, while the 2015 version included Rey, BB-8, Princess Leia, R2-D2 and others from Star Wars, the group said.

It hopes the characters will provide a kind of bridge for students to transition from the short introductory tutorials to a full computer science course, offered at its onlineCode Studio.

“We regularly hear from teachers that their students want to keep coding,” said Hadi Partovi, the group’s CEO and co-founder.

Students, he said, have been known to skip recess to spend more time coding. “Part of this is because it's inherently fun to create things, to make apps or games,” he said. “But a huge part of it is because of the engagement factor from interacting with characters like Anna and Elsa, BB-8, or R2-D2.”

The new partnership was announced at the annual conference of the International Society for Technology in Education. Code.org said more than 11 million students and 330,000 teachers have accounts on its platform.

"If you'd told me three years ago that we'd have courses in hundreds of thousands of classrooms and that kids would be able to write code to control R2-D2, I would have said it's impossible," Partovi said.

Jimmy Pitaro, chairman of Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media, said computer science “will play a critical role in the careers of the next generation of innovators and storytellers, and we want to help open the door to students interested in this field.”

The Disney effort isn’t Code.org’s first foray into using commercial properties to get children interested in coding. Last fall it partnered with Microsoft to release a 14-level coding tutorial built around the popular world-building game Minecraft.

Code.org hopes to make computer science part of most schools' curriculums — it has already had a few key successes, helping persuade Chicago Public Schools to make it a graduation requirement. San Francisco and New York schools are also bringing coding into every school.