Elementary school students and learning to code

In December, for Computer Science Education Week, the Hour of Code Initiative which began in 2013 was expanded. I came into it late, actually worked with Hour of Code the week after Computer Science Education Week, and was pleasantly surprised at how well students took to it. I learned some basic coding myself about 11-12 years ago through an online community college course, just enough to add color and change fonts on a web page and insert a picture, but never enough to do animation. I taught my sons the bit that I know, and they enjoyed opening up Notepad on our ancient PC and playing around with it. Until the Hour of Code initiative was launched, I had never heard of coding using blocks as opposed to writing out the HTML elements. The Code.org site uses characters from Frozen, which is more popular than any Disney movie I can remember, including Brave and Tangled, and 3rd through 5th grade students (both boys and girls) were highly motivated to make Elsa move. I was able to play around with it and make Elsa go in a straight line and a right angle, but several students had her skating in snowflake formations. Another segment of the elementary school lessons section of the site includes code writing with Flappy Bird, also very popular as students worked to make a bird go up and down and customize it. When I have a class of students and they finish the lesson I give them, check out their books and have time left over, I usually allow them a few minutes on one of the learning programs that the school system buys: Dreambox, Raz Kids, Compass Learning. In the past month, students have asked me if they can have a few minutes on Code.org instead. I hope this initiative does what its founders and sponsors hope, and gets more kids interested in computer science. I know several whose interest has certainly been captured, whether they run with it later on or not.