President Obama writes his first-ever line of code, generates a simple square

On Monday, December 8, President Barack Obama became the first president to program a computer—actually the first to even write a few lines of JavaScript.

Last year, a non-profit organization called Code.org dedicated to granting students the opportunity to learn computer programming launched the Hour of Code campaign to show how beneficial an hour of programming can really be. Since its commencement, 53 million students worldwide have tried the Hour of Code .

Now President Obama is one of them. On the organization’s one-year anniversary, Obama kicked off Hour of Code with a video message encouraging young people to learn more about the technology that touches our lives.
 
Twenty middle school students joined the President at the White House where he toyed with Google’s Blockly tool and JavaScript.  The program he created was pretty simple and only able to draw a square on the screen, but it was a start. 

Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi said that the President didn’t complete the tutorial but instead visited with each student while they worked.
 
Learn more about code.org here.

If this story interested you, be sure to check out some others about the Presidents and technology:

Who was the President behind the Space Shuttle?
Have any U.S. Presidents been engineers?