Get ready, get set… code! It’s the time of year to get thinking about programming with the Hour of Code.

For many years, Wolfram Research has promoted and supported initiatives that encourage computation, programming, and STEM education, and we are always thrilled when efforts are taken by others to do the same. Code.org, in conjunction with Computer Science Education Week, is sponsoring an event to encourage educators and organizations across the country to dedicate a single hour to coding. This hour gives kids (and adults, too!) a taste of what it means to study computer science—and how it can actually be a creative, fun, and fulfilling process. Millions of students participated in the Hour of Code in past years, and instructors are looking for more engaging activities for their students to try. Enter the Wolfram Language.

Built into the Wolfram Language is the technology from Wolfram|Alpha that enables natural language input—and lets students create code just by writing English.

In addition to natural language understanding, the Wolfram Language also has lots of built-in functions that let you show core computation concepts with tiny amounts of code (often just one or two functions!).

With our newly released cloud products, you can get started for free!

To support the Hour of Code, Wolfram is putting together a workshop for instructors and parents to learn more about programming activities in the Wolfram Language. The workshop takes place December 4, 4–5pm EST. Register for the free event here. During the workshop, we will introduce the basics of the Wolfram Language and walk through several resources to get students coding, as well as demo our upcoming Wolfram Programming Lab offering.

Learning and experimenting with programming in the Wolfram Language doesn’t have to stop with the Hour of Code. Have students create a tweet-length program with Wolfram’s Tweet-a-Program. Compose a tweet-length Wolfram Language program and tweet it to @WolframTaP. Our Twitter bot will run your program in the Wolfram Cloud and tweet back the result.

Learn more about the Wolfram Language with the Wolfram Language Code Gallery. Covering a variety of fields, programming styles, and project sizes, the Wolfram Language Code Gallery shows examples of what can be done with the knowledge-based Wolfram Language—including deployment on the web or elsewhere.

There are other training materials and resources for learning the Wolfram Language. Find numerous free and on-demand courses available on our training site. The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an open source database of close to 10,000 interactive apps that can be used as learning examples.

As sponsors of organizations like Computer-Based Math™, which is working toward building a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart, and the Mathematica Summer Camp, where high school students with limited programming experience learn to code using Mathematica, we are acutely aware of how important programming is in schools today.

Congrats on getting your student or child involved with the Hour of Code, and we look forward to seeing what they create!