We’re talking about programming, and an array of high-profile tech figures and celebrities are throwing their support behind the new initiative.

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, and Gabe Newell are some of the big names that participated in a new ad called “What Most Schools Don’t Teach.”

In the video, they discuss how they all got started in coding and why they think it’s important that more people learn the process.

Check it out:

The push come from Code.org, a non-profit foundation dedicated to increasing the amount of computer programming education available to everyone.

“Our vision is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn how to code. We believe computer science and computer programming should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra,” they say.

Code.org was founded by entrepreneurs Hadi and Ali Partovi, who between them have been early investors in Facebook, Dropbox, airbnb, Zappos, and Indiegogo.

This is the third Hacker Cup that Facebook has hosted.

“Hacking is core to how we build at Facebook. Whether we’re building a prototype for a major product like Timeline at a Hackathon, creating a smarter search algorithm, or tearing down walls at our new headquarters, we’re always hacking to find better ways to solve problems. In the Hacker Cup, programmers from around the world will be judged on accuracy and speed as they race to solve algorithmic problems to advance through up to five rounds of programming challenges. This is your chance to compete against the world’s best programmers for awesome prizes and the title of World Champion,” says Facebook.

Of course, hackathons are some of the main ways that companies (Facebook included) come up with potential new products and cool new features to said products. Facebook, for one, is pretty proud of its hacker roots.

The registration period will last for a few weeks, followed by some online elimination rounds. The finals are always held on campus in Menlo Park.

Here’s the schedule, according to Facebook:

Facebook Hacker Cup3 days ago

Attention Hackers! The dates have been set for Facebook Hacker Cup 2013. Jan 7 – Jan 27– Registration Jan 25 – Jan 27 — Online Qualification Round Feb 2 — Online Elimination Round 1 Feb 9 — Online Elimination Round 2 Feb 16 — Online Elimination Round 3 March 22 -23 — Onsite Finals at Facebook Registration will open next week – stay tuned! Powered by socialditto  1,000+ likes ·  220 comments

If interested, you can sign up here.

Mojang announced today that it’s working on Minecraft: Pi Edition for the Raspberry Pi, the $35 Linux computer. The hope is that kids, adults and anybody else can hack away at this version of Minecraft and come away with some basic programming skills in the process.

Minecraft: Pi Edition is based on Pocket Edition, the iOS and Android version of Minecraft. Unlike those versions, however, Minecraft: Pi Edition will be totally free. It’s part of a partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to get more kids interested in programming on cheap hardware that anybody can afford.

It should be noted that this version of Minecraft is still fully playable. In fact, Mojang encourages players to just start out building objects in Minecraft before moving on to code-related actions. Even then, learning code should pretty straightforward for most as players will be learning code in the context of Minecraft as they manipulate the world around them.

Minecraft: Pi Edition is a great move on the part of Mojang and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It can be difficult to educate children, but turning their education into games is a great way of making it actually fun. A game like Minecraft, which kids love, should be even more effective than other programming and educational games that feel more patronizing than fun.

It’s a 40-minute video that talks about the programming language and its features.

“When we announced Dart, it kicked up a bit of a dust storm,” says Dart engineer Bob Nystrom in the YouTube description for the video. “In this talk, I discuss the challenges that Google and others face when building web apps today. I introduce Dart and show how its features were designed specifically to address some of those challenges.”

“You’ll see how Dart protects you from many of the dark corners and sharp edges of JavaScript and the DOM,” he adds. “When your programs grow and evolve over time, you’ll see how Dart can help keep your app nimble and maintainable. Thanks to Dart’s Dart to JavaScript compiler, you’ll see how you get all of that while still being able to run on any browser that supports modern JS and without the bad karma of fracturing the web.”

If you want to learn more about Dart, check out these two videos from Google I/O.

The first video is from the session: Dart – A Modern Web Language. Here’s the video’s description:

The two creators of Dart will discuss the rationale behind Dart’s design and its impact on web scalability and performance. They’ll also present how Dart helps developers innovate by increasing their productivity without breaking backwards compatibility.

The second is from the session: Migrating Code from GWT to Dart. Here’s the description:

Curious to learn how to port your GWT code to Dart? In this session, we will go over Dart equivalents for various GWT libraries and idioms, techniques for interoperating with existing GWT server backends, and tricks to allow Dart code to talk to existing GWT and Javascript code.

According to Google, you should learn Dart because:

“We’re looking for companies…where we can add both capital and operational experience and sort of make an impact and work with the entrepreneurs to build their team,” said Cameron Winklevoss.

Now, they’re looking for software engineers. Well, Cameron Winklevoss is. But since his Twitter details still boasts that “he’s 6’5″, 220 and there’s two of me,” we’ll just assume that both the twins are in on it.

On Tuesday, Cameron Winklevoss tweeted this to his followers:

If you’re unfamiliar, Ruby on Rails is an open-source web app framework based on the Ruby programming language.

So, what are the Winklevii planning? Whatever it is, Twitter employee Andrew Row’s reply suggests that they play it safe this time:

As you may remember, we’re big fans of the Winklevii on Twitter around here. Usually we like to track their non-business-oriented tweets, such as dispatches about their love of Big Bird, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the fact that someone was recently screwing with them at JFK airport.

On that front, I’d be remiss to leave out that Cameron Winklevoss seems to have found the best show on television:

The community feedback for the Visual Studio 11 beta has been corralled into three key areas:

An overall desire for more visual “energy” and contrast
Calls for a more balanced application of Metro styling
A desire for greater icon clarity and differentiation through the use of color

To that effect, Microsoft has made some significant changes to Visual Studio 11 for the release candidate version. The company has provided before and after comparisons to show the changes that were made.

Visual Studio 11 Beta

Visual Studio 11 RC

The first problem was there was not enough color. Many users complained that everything was too gray. To that end, they have taken steps to colorize more of the components that developers will work with. Apparently colorize means turning everything blue, but blue and gray are a nice combination. The other change is bringing more colors to the status bar to denote different statuses from development to debug mode.

Since Visual Studio 11 is likely to launch alongside Windows 8, Microsoft has been applying the Metro style to the interface in the form of using all caps for the tool window titles. These have been returned to normal with only the top level menu items going all caps for greater emphasis.

To better fit into the Metro style, Microsoft has also created a new window chrome. No longer will there be a blue border around the window to denote the OS namesake. Now the entire window is the same color to bring the entire thing together. I find it more aesthetically pleasing, but some are sure to disagree.

Probably the biggest change introduced in the Visual Studio 11 beta was the removal of color from icons. This obviously created some confusion for similar looking commands since color is a great way to tell these apart. Microsoft has heard the complaints and will be adding color back to select commands.

Color is also being added back into the icons within the Solution Explorer, IntelliSense and the application icons. This should make everything more readable and easier to distinguish.

It’s obvious that Microsoft cares about their users by making these important changes to Visual Studio 11. There’s still more work to be done though before the official launch sometime this year. If you have yet to download it, check out the Visual Studio 11 beta and keep sending your feedback.

Augmented reality company metaio doesn’t like that so they set off to do something about it. The company’s tools contained in the metaio Mobile SDK have been a huge hit for developers wanting to create AR experiences on mobile devices. It has seen over 10,000 downloads with 1,000 active developers. There are almost 200 applications out there now built on their Mobile SDK with 900 currently in development.

“The response from the developer community was phenomenal,” said metaio’s CTO Peter Meier. “It however inspired us to offer software that would put this technology in the hands of designers, content providers, publishers, and the average users who might not have extensive programming knowledge.”

That’s why the company is now introducing the metaio Creator. It’s aimed squarely at “non-developers, designers and people who have the desire to create amazing AR experiences but with to do so without using a hard-coding environment.” The Creator is compatible with junaio, a mobile AR browser, and can be used to quickly create cloud-based AR content for Android and iOS devices.

In an even more exciting news, the next update for junaio will introduce HTML and JavaScript support, so developers will be able to expand their AR applications to do even more. Looking even further ahead, the metaio Creator will allow users to upload their creations to all of metaio’s software including the Mobile SDK.

“The most important thing for metaio is to cultivate development and content creation for the entire community,” said Head of US Marketing Trak Lord. “Programmers, users, designers, artists – everyone should be able to live in the Augmented City.”

From May 8 through 21, the metaio Creator will be 30 percent off. The price is still a pretty hefty $227, but it may be worth it if it delivers on its promise of advanced AR creation without the need for expansive programming knowledge. There is also a demo available for you to try out.

In its eighth year running, Summer of Code saw the highest number of applications and applicants all vying for a coveted spot with one of the 180 organizations, including Twitter, that are offering programming internships this summer. Google received 6,685 applications from 4,258 students representing 98 countries.

Unfortunately, not everybody can make it, but a large number of them did. In fact, this year saw more students being accepted than ever before. There are 1,212 students from 69 countries participating in this year’s Summer of Code.

India is at the top spot this year with 227 students having been accepted in the program. The United States is in second with 172 students. German is in third with 72 students. The rest of the students came from a variety of other countries including Russia, China, Poland, Sri Lanka, Romania, France, Canada and more.

Google makes special note of a student from Mauritius being accepted into the program, a first for the small African nation. It just proves that programming is starting to be accepted and proliferate throughout the world. Like art and music, code is a universal language that can tie people together.

In other fantastic news, this year set a new record for the number of women accepted into the program. Out of the 1,212 students accepted this year, 8.3 percent identified themselves as women. That’s up from 7.1 percent last year. Here’s hoping that number can get above 10 percent next year. We need more women in computer science and programs like this are perfect for fostering that kind of interest early on.

The next update will see Google breaking down students by university. I hope my Alma Mater, the University of Kentucky, will be proudly representing this year. They have a fantastic computer science program that doesn’t get enough credit for all the awesome work they do.

The NASA Tournament Lab is collaborating with the TopCoder community to host the competition, which is now entering its second phase of the PDS Challenge series. The goal of the collaboration is to hopefully build new and different types of apps with the non-technical users in mind, making it easier for children or instructors to access PDS’s trove of data.

Competition registration is open now through 6:00PM EST Friday, April 20, at TopCoder’s website. This stage of the PDS Challenge series is offering $13,000 in total cash awards, an invitation to visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, to experience the Mars Science Laboratory mission landing on site and an opportunity to meet members of the NASA astronaut-led judging panel.

“There is a huge untapped potential for the extraction of knowledge and insight from within the PDS archive which could be transformed by average people from different, non-scientific walks of life,” said Jason Crusan, NASA Chief Technologist for Human Exploration and Operations. “These kinds of Challenges are being made to produce useful tools which will allow, for example, high school-level students to access, organize and make their own discoveries from this huge volume of digital data.”

This task looks to be no slouch, either. Given that PDS has fourteen different search tools dedicated to just the search of data related to Mars, typically divided up into how the information was collected (e.g., images captured by the Viking Orbiter or the Mars Pathfinder), entrants into the competition will most definitely need to wear their developer Nikes.