The non-profit foundation Code.Org has released a video starring Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, NBA All-Star Chris Bosh and Twitter creator, Jack Dorsey, among many others to talk about why more schools need to make computer programming classes available to students.
Their mission? Spreading the word that there is a worldwide shortage of computer programmers.
Code.Org’s vision is that every student in every school in the US has the opportunity to learn how to code, and that computer science and computer programming should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra – something many Irish Coder Dojo volunteers and participants would like to also see happen here.
Currently in the US, 9 out of 10 schools don’t offer computer programming classes and less than 2.4% of college are graduating with computer science degrees, even though it is predicated that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million jobs in computing.
- 97,000 people are employed in ICT firms in Ireland ‐ 27,000 in ICT hardware segments and 70,000 in software and ICT services
- The indigenous software industry comprises more than 500 companies and employs over 10,000 people
- Internet communications (including cloud computing) is set to be one of the fastest growing sub‐markets (potential growth rate as high as 20% per annum over the next decade
- Information security has emerged as a key growth opportunity within the ICT sector
- Cloud Computing has the potential to create more than 8,000 jobs within the ICT sector by 2014 (Microsoft Ireland study)
- Employment in the Digital Games sector could double from 2,500 to 5,000 by end of 2014 (Forfás report)
