Via Wired.com:

COMPUTER SCIENCE MAY be critical to careers of the future, but kids today don’t much care about it. For the most part, they still need convincing that coding is cool.

A new partnership between Code.org and Lucasfilm should help.

Today, as part of its annual Hour of Code event, Code.org is launching a free online tutorial that prompts kids to build their own games, based on characters in the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Star Wars heroines Princess Leia and Rey, a character from the new film, will lead students through the lessons, where they’ll learn to write code to design their own games featuring characters like R2-D2 ad C-3PO.

“One of the most important things for us is to make computer science more popular, to broaden participation and get students of all ages and all backgrounds to give it a shot,” says Hadi Partovi, who founded Code.org. So far at least, Code.org has been successful in achieving that goal. Of the 5 million students currently registered on Code.org, around 2 million are girls and around 2 million are black or Hispanic.

That’s one reason why the Hour of Code tutorial, which is available to anyone online, focuses on the film’s prominent female characters, instead of, say Han Solo or Luke Skywalker. “Computer science is a male-dominated field,” Partovi says, “and having these two strong heroines with the robots is a great message, and the type of diversity we’re trying to spread.”

Last year, the tutorials also focused on female characters, highlighting Elsa and Anna from Disney’s Frozen. According to Code.org, that tutorial was completed more than 13 million times—even President Obama tried his hand at it. This year, Code.org expects nearly four times as many people to take part.

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