The Spirit of Promoting and Giving
Ever heard of CODE.org? Well, you have now! Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director of Valve, has teamed up with the computer science orientated group to promote the 'Hour of Code' campaign, which recently enabled young coders the chance to have an audience with Gaben himself and learn from his magical inspirational teachings.
Of course, they wouldn't get to experience this every day. The actual Hour of Code is a challenge outlined by CODE.org to learn the basics of software development skills, using a range of online tutorials and tools provided by the team. There has been around 3 million different students that have taken part and completed the 'write your own program', fancy that!
What you might not find surprising is that some of the tutorials feature characters from Angry Birds and even some from EA owned PopCap's Plants vs Zombies! Oh yeah, speaking of EA, they're actually running their own little promotion for students. They need to complete the 20 hour training course in order to be awarded with a special selective prize! What does that include you might ask? Well they'll offer you the following games for their Origin platform:
Plants vs Zombies (Surprise surprise, huh?)
Bejeweled 3
FIFA Soccer 13
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition
Hey, at least it's something, even if it is EA giving it away for...you know...coding. Let's hope there isn't some contract to make you an official employee after the 20 hours!