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Announcing Meetups and our Partnership with the White House

02/05/2012

We’ve been blown away by the response to Code Year, our latest initiative. In less than 7 days, more than 300,000 people pledged to learn to code in 2012 (you can still sign up!). We were thinking about how to further spread the word about coding literacy when Aneesh Chopra, the CTO of the United States, called last week with an interesting proposal. We thought the proposal was in line with what we’re trying to achieve here at Codecademy so we agreed to partner up!

Today, we’re proud to announce that we will be working with the White House to get more kids and adults learning to code. With their Summer Jobs+ program, the White House has been working on finding jobs for hundreds of thousands of people over the summer. We think learning to code is an integral part of finding a job in the 21st century economy, so we’ll be helping out by rolling out a course called Code Summer+. This will be a shorter course than Code Year that aims to teach people the basics of programming. You can find a bit more on the White House’s blog.

More importantly, we’re pleased to announce that we’re moving Codecademy from being a strictly online learning platform to something you can do offline as well. Users all around the country and the world are getting together to talk about Code Year and to support each other as they learn. We’ve seen them get together in New York and elsewhere. Today, we’re launching meetups for Code Year and Codecademy participants worldwide. Anyone can sign up to host their own meetup or to attend another one at codeyear.com/meetups. You can meet weekly to discuss each Code Year lesson or whenever you’d like.

All of this wouldn’t be possible without the help of some awesome partners. Today, we’re pleased to announce that Code Year is now endorsed by the Kauffman Foundation, Startup Weekend, Launchpad LA (hosting LA Codecademy meetups!), AngelPad, Teens in Tech, Ladies Learning to Code (in Canada), Women Who Code, Quanta (an accelerator in Kosovo), Open Network Lab (an accelerator in Japan). Companies like Foursquare, Sailthru, Skillshare, and Twilio have signed on to support our effort to get the world to code as well. We’re working with dozens more partners not included in this post (but who will be included in a forthcoming site just for partners).

We’re constantly trying to improve Codecademy for all of our users. This week, we launched new Q&A forums as well – if you look at any lesson on the site, you’ll notice you can click “Q&A” to ask questions and get answers from fellow users. We’re grateful for all the user feedback and we’re working as hard as we can to deliver a good experience for you all.

Thanks for using Codecademy!

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