Schools are being asked to encourage their students to take part in an “Hour of Code” this week.
It’s a weeklong event hosted by an organization called Brilliant Labs and code.org.
Executive Director Jeff Wilson says this event is very important to New Brunswick’s future economy as technology is transforming every industry on the planet.
“It’s so important that teachers understand, how do we get our children in the province of New Brunswick to start coding and start understanding the importance of coding?” says Wilson. “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs in the future, high paying jobs.”
According to statistics, Canada will need 183,000 people to fill tech jobs and high demand occupations by 2019.
“And every two year old knows how to use an iPad, will they ever know how to create with an iPad? Or create for an iPad?” says Wilson. “Our vehicles are going to be self driving, our fridges, our microwaves, our cellphones, our computers, all our mobile apps, there’s somebody, somewhere who programmed it to function.”
That includes computer programmers & engineers, and also graphic designers & illustrators, which all require coding skills.
