Here’s How To Program the Lights on a White House Holiday Tree

The White House will let you design a light display on one of its holiday trees using CODE. The site uses a visual coding tool that makes it easy, even for non-coders such as myself, to design a light display.

My White House Christmas Tree Lights Display – Pretty Random, Huh?

Vox:

The government worked with Google’s Made with Code project to put together a site that lets you program your own lighting design for one of the White House trees.

You simply drag and drop “code” into a display frameworks, setting up variables such as the number of lights, the colors of the lights, and how the lights will travel around and up and down the tree. An animated graphic shows you how your changes will all play out. Once you’ve programmed your perfect lights display, you simply click “Done,” and select the tree you want to display your lights on.

Trees are designated by state and territory, so you can pick a tree from any state, however, be aware that some state trees are more popular than others, so it could take awhile for your light show to appear on certain trees.

If you care, my code will run on the Tennessee tree around 4:07PM EST today, December 15th.

This would be a great project to expose your children, (or yourself, it’s never to late to learn), to programming.

The White House CODE Holiday Tree site is available at: https://holidays.madewithcode.com/project/lights

Have fun!

Chris Hauk

Chris is a Senior Editor at Mactrast. He lives somewhere in the deep Southern part of America, and yes, he has to pump in both sunshine and the Internet.