The organisers are seeking $5 million before December 14, and the money will be used to train 10,000 computer science teachers.

The full funds haven’t yet been raised, but with more than a month to go and almost $3 million in the kitty so far, it looks likely to succeed. At any rate, it doesn’t matter too much. Given this is on a so-called ‘flexible funding’ campaign, all monies raised will be kept regardless.

It’s also this very fact that means this project can lay claim to the Indiegogo funding record – as you’ll no doubt remember, the Ubuntu Edge smartphone actually garnered more than $10 million in funds, but ultimately ended in failure as it was required to meet its full $32 million goal for the funds to be kept.

This campaign represents just a small facet of the broader initiative. Entrepreneur Hadi Partovi raised $10 million from big-name technologists such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg to launch Code.org, a not-for-profit seeking to drive computer science in schools.

Hour of Code is the first high-profile event to emerge from Code.org, with thousands of schools encouraged to spend at least one hour every week teaching students programming.

There have been some big-name backers of this specific crowdfunding campaign, including Mark Zuckerberg and John Doerr who donated $1 million between them. As a matter of fact, every donation is being matched dollar-by-dollar by big-name Code.org backers, including Bill Gates and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman.

Prior to this, the Indiegogo funding record was held by a craft brewery called Stone Brewing Co., a campaign that raised $2,531,775. Hour of Code is the seventh Indiegogo campaign to raise north of $2 million since May.

Over on Kickstarter, there have been a couple of projects that have raised more than $10 million, including a cooler that that notched up $13 million of its comparitively paltry $50,000 goal.

Posted from : http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/11/05/hour-code-sets-indiegogo-crowdfunding-record-little-help-zuckerberg-gates-co/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+(The+Next+Web+All+Stories)