The Sun Get Kids Coding Google Campaign

The Sun us launched a campaign “Get Kids Coding” in partnership with Google, backed by a host of celebrities including Will.i.am, industry leaders and MPs. The aim is to make coding cool and encourage kids to take up coding as a career.

It’s amazing how many jobs require coding skills, everything from social media, music, crime-scene investigation, video gaming, fashion, farming, government, education, design, manufacturing, or film and special effects all need a knowledge of coding, and that’s if you don’t want to become a hard core coder as a software engineer.

We often hear online sellers say that they don’t understand coding, they can’t edit bits on their website themselves and don’t even know how their own eBay listing designs work. Many don’t even know the code to put a hyperlink in to make text clickable.

I have to admit here at Tamebay we’re not the greatest of coders, but Dan and I use code every day to put blog posts together and make sure images sit in the right place and are the right size. However it was Sue who was Tamebay’s coding genius and whilst we can write a bit of HTML, it was Sue that coded in PHP and made the site work. Today we sub the heavy lifting out to the guys at WeAreJH and without them we’d be lost.

However, even if you don’t code, you should be able to read and understand code and in yesterday’s print edition they gave a fairly simple code example to display a Google “I’m feeling lucky” search box on a website.

<form action=”search”><Table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0><tr><td align=center nowrap><input maxlength=2048 name=q size=55 title=”Google Search” value=””><input name=btnl type=submit value=”I’m Feeling Lucky”></td></tr></form>

Unfortunately the code they published is wrong demonstrating why it’s so important that people learn code. If you dissect the code it opens a form, opens a table, opens a table row, opens a table data cell, opens an input field, places a submit button to click, closes the table data cell, closes the table row and finally closes the form.

For those that are interested, the biggest error is that the code does not close the table! That will wreck the layout of the entire webpage. There should have been a </table> html tag before the final </form>.

We fully support the Sun and Google’s Get Children Coding campaign which you can read more about on the Sun Website. You may not need to be an expert coder, but being able to read and understand HTML is a great skill to have, especially if you want to tweak your own eBay listing descriptions. The Sun’s error simply demonstrates why this matters.