At Code.org, children have not survived homework: the 32-bit index is over

The task from the introductory course “Introduction to Computer Science” on the Code Studio platform

The site for learning how to program Code.org got into an awkward situation. Due to “technical problems” on the Code Studio platform, on the morning of January 20, from 9:19 to 10:33 PST, the work of programming students — all the written code and other actions on the site — could not be saved.

The technical director of the educational site, Jeremy Stone (Jeremy Stone), promptly published an explanation of what happened: “Until now, we have stored work on the programming of students in a table with a 32-bit index,” he wrote. “This database can store only 4 billion lines of activity information. We did not realize that we were approaching this limit, and the table was full. ”

“Now we have made a new table of students' activity, which keeps learning progress. With the new table, we switched to a 64-bit index, which allows you to store up to 18 quintillion lines of information, the technical director explained. “The positive side is that the new table will be able to store information about educational work for millions of years.”
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Because of the problem with transferring data, the site generally went offline for a while, which could have disturbed the 16 million students who completed assignments and saved the results. Later, the programming programming platform returned to operation with partially recovered data.

The administration explained that the code created between 9:19 to 10:33 PST could not be saved, it is irretrievably lost. In addition, at the time of transferring data from the old table to the new, some previously saved code was temporarily unavailable. But within a day, the Code.org programmers completed the data transfer, and all of the saved user information appeared again in their accounts.

Code.org is a non-profit organization and website that helps students and other beginning students learn the basics of programming. The site has free programming lessons. The site opened in January 2013 with the original goal of compiling a catalog of computer courses in US schools. The founder of the project Hadi Partovi (Hadi Partovi) then noticed that 90% of American schools do not teach programming at all, although this is a "fundamental discipline." The initiative received universal support. In February 2013, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and other programmers and entrepreneurs starred in advertising Code.org — they all said how important it is to learn how to program.

In December 2013, Code.org launched the nationwide Hour of Code Challenge competition , in which all students and schoolchildren in the country were invited to participate. Participants solved simple programming tasks: it was necessary to write a small piece of code in the visual “childish” programming language Blocky in order to achieve the goal. After the launch of the competition, even the then President of the United States, Barack Obama, as well as the leaders of major IT companies, including Microsoft and Apple, participated in it. A total of about 20 million participants wrote more than 600 million lines of code.

Since most schools lacked programming lessons, Code.org organizers began to solve this problem. Since 2014, programming courses have opened there, in which any school could participate. By 2017, more than 51 thousand informatics teachers have studied at Code.org. Partnership agreements were concluded with 120 school districts and many schools for schoolchildren training on the site Code.org. According to a survey of teachers, 99% of them recommend the introductory course " Introduction to Computer Science " (20-hour course on the basics of computer science for all ages, available in Russian).

According to current statistics, 506,546 informatics teachers and 16,472,129 students are registered on the Code Studio educational platform.

Now the organizers of the national American program have set themselves the goal of eliminating inequalities in computer science: attracting girls and minorities (African Americans and Latin Americans) to programming, adding computer science to all 12th grade American schools and forcing the authorities of all 50 states to recognize computer science as a basic school subject (20 already done it). Code.org is now beyond the borders of America: programming courses are now available in 45 languages ​​of the world, including Russian.


Probably, when the project was created in 2013, the organizers did not count on such popularity, therefore they initially designed the 32-bit index for the training platform. Like, 4 billion lines should be enough for everyone .

If you look at this problem philosophically, then on January 20, 2017, students in programming courses received a truly valuable practical lesson from the real world. The initial choice of project architecture may have unintended consequences for the implementation, manageability and viability of the project in the long term. In addition, this case will encourage children to think about how to avoid the risks caused by the supervision of some adults. And that the cloud cannot be trusted 100%.