What an incredible year it has been!

Looking back on 2016, one thing is crystal clear: we are incredibly fortunate to be part of such an inspired community of makers!

This past year, our maker community grew to over 44 million students across the globe. These amazing students completed over 1 million coding activities and wrote more than 2.2 billion lines of code.

In an effort to shine a spotlight on members of our maker community, we launched the Featured Maker series. We can’t say enough about how proud we are of our community and how excited we are to introduce new experiences for our community in 2017!

In addition to all that our community achieved in 2016, the Tynker team has been hard at work creating rich learning experiences and amazing courses to empower young makers around the world.

Here are just a few highlights from 2016:

Minecraft Modding and Game Design – In May, we launched support for Minecraft modding with skin, mob, block, and item editors and a Mod Designer to create mods. We now have five scaffolded courses that introduce modding and 3D game design. The community has built and shared over a million Minecraft items in just the last six months.

Apple uses Tynker to run coding camps – This summer, Apple debuted coding camps at retail stores for kids ages 8 through 12 using Tynker. Campers used Tynker to learn coding concepts and controlled Sphero in the 3 day camp.

Robotics and Drone Programming – With our support for Parrot Minidrones and Lego WeDo 2.0 robotics kits, you can now use the Tynker app to fly Parrot drones, control Sphero bots, and program the WeDo robotics kits. We can’t wait to see all your fun programs.

Advanced Programming Courses – Sky Pirates, launched in November, transitions kids from block-based coding to JavaScript in a game-based environment. In the coming months, look forward to learning several other languages such as Python and C# with more fun courses from Tynker.

Mobile App Publishing Community – Our mobile community is thriving, with thousands of apps published weekly. The free Tynker app supports offline access so kids can create even with no network access.

Code with Peep, Hot Wheels, Monster High, and More – We partnered with several organizations to created activities that motivate kids with the brands they love. Students have created millions of projects based on these activities.

In 2017, the Tynker team will continue to create amazing experiences that children love so that they can continue to discover, play, and explore creatively with code.

We can’t wait to see what our community will create in 2017!