Obama was promoting Computer Science Education Week and Code.org’s Hour of Code campaign, which encourages kids to try programming for at least one hour. “It turns out the concepts are not that complicated,” Obama told the students at the White House, though his attempt to explain it suggested otherwise:

The basic concept behind coding is that you take zeros and ones, you take two numbers, yes or no, and those can be translated into electrical messages that then run through the computer…. So all it’s doing is it’s saying yes or no over and over again, and the computer’s powerful enough that it can read a really long set of instructions really quickly.

Something like that.

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