“What about workshops, weekend camps, and clubs?”

Hackathons, workshops, technology camps, and coding clubs offer a little more time than Hour of Code. But again, there’s a standard bag of tricks most of these activities turn to, which should leave you suspicious. Some of these tricks include:

Providing canned assets and single-purpose templates.

Dressing up boilerplate code with creative non-coding activities.

Avoiding meaningful choices by playing “code madlibs”.

Think of Logo, if you’re old enough to have used it. You started with a blank screen (except for the turtle!), on which you could draw anything you chose. Code was the medium you used for your art, and whatever you wanted to create could be done with that medium. There was no script, and no multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank answers.

Today’s coding activities are a very different experience. To begin with, someone has usually done much of the work for you. Often you’re handed a library of professional quality characters, sounds, and backdrops. If not, then maybe you just grab what you need from Google Image Search. You certainly wouldn’t spend any time figuring out how to draw an airplane out of lines and angles in code! It wouldn’t look nearly as good as the Disney cartoon plane you found in 10 seconds of searching.

Free of the need to use code for your drawing, you have a lot less code to write. But at the same time, the code that remains is more abstract and harder to understand. Without any practice, you don’t even stand a chance. Thank goodness for the project template! The teacher gave it to you. It has most of the code written for you. You plug in your airplane image, click the green flag, and your game is looking pretty good already.

You might start to feel now that you aren’t programming, after all. But you don’t worry too much. The curriculum may even be supported by research in exactly how much can be done for you, while still fooling you that you’ve designed it yourself. In short: a lot! If you’re the one that decided your game was about planes — it could have been about aliens, or ladybugs, or knights — then you’ll probably be fine.

The template isn’t complete, though. Surely, you’ll need to learn some coding to finish it. The template project is missing a few key parts. You need to finish a few event handlers, to say that when you press up, the plane should move up. Maybe you need to fill in an inequality to decide whether you’ve won or lost. No worries: there’s a guide or a video with step-by-step prompts to help you write exactly the code you need. You might make some choices here, like how many points it’s worth to fly through a hoop. But you can’t change anything really important, because you might break the template. It’s like playing Madlibs: you’re filling in a word or two, but the sentence structure was someone else’s job.

“Coding is easy,” you say. “It’s just following the directions!”