Code.org first exploded on the CS education scene in Feb 2013 with its first video featuring Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates talking about computer science. 10 months later, it launched an Hour of Code campaign that has taken the world by storm. Reaching 10 million students in just 3 days, the Hour of Code became the fastest-spreading service in the history of technology OR education. Code.org founder Hadi Partovi will talk about how he came up with the concepts behind these grassroots campaigns, and how Code.org hopes to harness the reach of the broader CS community to grow computer science education in schools.

We extend an earlier automatic motion-synthesis algorithm for physically realistic articulated figures in several ways. First, we summarize several incremental improvements to the original algorithm that improve its efficiency significantly and provide the user with some ability to influence what motions are generated. These techniques can be used by an animator to achieve a desired movement style, or they can be used to guarantee variety in the motions synthesized over several runs of the algorithm. Second, we report on new mechanisms that support the concatenation of existing, automatically generated motion controllers to produce complex, composite movement. Finally, we describe initial work on generalizing the techniques from 2D to 3D articulated figures. Taken together, these results illustrate the promise and challenges afforded by the controller-based approach to automatic motion synthesis for computer animation.