Natasha Singer

Starring the biggest tech titans of them all, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

And it opens with them talking about how they got started learning to code.

And you have these powerful billionaires making this pitch that anyone actually can learn to code.

Any kid.

These are our heroic innovators, and they're rich, and they've achieved the American dream, and they're telling every kid in America, you could be us if you just learned to code, and by the way, we'll hire you.

Like, what's better than that?

You know, the video was very influential.

Millions of people saw this video in the first couple of weeks.

And I think it also, you know, just the idea that coding is you give computers an instruction of what to do.

In many families with school-age kids, this video helped coding become a household word.

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.