One day when watching YouTube, I saw a very interesting advertisement. The advertisement was by Glico, the Pocky manufacturer. What's more interesting was that the advertisement was about CODING! Yes, CODING! And Glico had cutely named the app, Glicode.
I randomly bumped into this advertisement after converting and connecting my local Malaysian virtual private network (VPN) to a Singaporean one. This advertisement speaks volumes as it clearly indicated that the acceptance level of knowing how to code was getting more important these days.
It shows how coding had integrated itself into the society of modern countries such as Singapore. In addition, knowing the basics of coding had slowly started to gain traction and importance in other countries such as Japan; which had integrated computer science education into elementary school curriculums (EZAKI GLICO CO., LTD. 2016).
Japan's been doing a lot of things right the last few years; not including World War 2 of course. Their strong Kaizen spirit and discipline tends to make them move forward faster than other countries.
This amazing pace had even attracted the attention of our beloved Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad who encouraged Malaysians to "Look East" in order to learn from our Asian counterpart.
In addition, a worldwide campaign known as "Hour of Code" is currently being ran online to the encourage young children and teens to code. Despite not being the target market of the Glicode advertisement, I am glad to see that there are events in Malaysia participating in the "Hour of Code" campaign! (Code.org 2018).
Hopefully, this means that Malaysia is on par with some of these countries in terms of accepting coding as part of our lives! Give our future generation a chance to become a doer, thinker and leader by injecting some codes into their lives!
Reference:
+ Code.org. 2018. "Join Us." Hour of Code. Accessed September 12, 2018.
https://hourofcode.com/my/en.
+ EZAKI GLICO CO., LTD. 2016. "GLICODE." glico. Accessed September 12, 2018.
http://cp.glico.jp/glicode/en/.