With their wildly successful 2013 drive under their belt, Code.org is ready to reach even more students with their 2014 Hour of Code (HOC) campaign. This year’s HOC, featuring Anna and Elsa from Disney’s Frozen, will be a one-hour activity where students, “will learn to write code to help Anna and Elsa create snowflakes and magical ‘ice craft,’ while also learning logic, math and cultivating creative confidence.”

In last year’s campaign, 20 million students participated, which is 1 in 4 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, and half of the students who participated were girls. At a Congressional hearing in early 2014, touting the success of the campaign, Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi said, “more students participated in computer science during Computer Science Education Week 2013 (of which, the Hour of Code campaign was a part) than had ever taken computer science in the history of our K-12 system.” And for 2014, Code.org is hoping to more than double those numbers.

The goal this year is to get 50 million girls to participate in the HOC. As stated in their announcement, “the girl-power theme of the tutorial is a continuation of our efforts to expand diversity in computer science and broaden female participation in the field, starting with younger students.” And with three weeks before the weeklong event, Code.org has an excellent jump start by already signing up over 40,000 classrooms worldwide.

I know I’ll be getting my middle-school-aged niece to sign up, along with myself, and I highly encourage all of our readers to do the same. Sign up now! And start coding too!