Natasha Singer

Hi, I'm Leah.

And I'm Tanya.

And we're lucky enough to be studying computer science.

And then later that year, Code.org launches another thing called Hour of Code.

And that was an annual event in schools where millions of kids simultaneously did these hour-long coding tutorials.

And that was also widely influential because it was fun, it was easy, and your whole school could do it at once.

And, you know, since that launch in 2012, Code.org says that kids have done these lessons or started them anyway hundreds of millions of times.

What happened after the video and the hour of code or as these things are happening was companies like Microsoft and Google together with code.org and dozens of national and local nonprofit groups across the country began an effort to scale computer science in schools.

And they used different methods.

One was they did lobby from state to state and get laws passed to elevate the status of computer science instead of like making an elective.

It's now a core science course.

They got money and they started programs to train thousands of more teachers to teach computer science.

Wow.

And they launched new curriculums in schools.

Wow.

You see, for example, in 2016, the College Board launched a new advanced placement course that was funded by the National Science Foundation, and it was called Computer Science Principles.

It was made to broaden the audience of kids who could participate in computer science.

And it has been wildly successful in terms of getting a huge number of kids to take this introductory on-ramp to computer science and just get a taste of what it means.

I think both the massive marketing and the increased availability of computer science in high schools helped spur a massive influx of kids to get into computer science.

And we can see from the data, last year the number of undergraduates majoring in computer science in the United States topped 170,000 students.