Older students worked on programming “Flappy Bird’ while students as young as kindergarten used visual coding to create a creature on a separate computer platform.

In other words, Flappy Bird continues to live on in its strange second life as a piece of de facto training material for budding programmers and game developers.

The Flappy Bird phenomenon may inspire the next generation of coders. That’s what one computer-science group is counting on. The technology nonprofit Code.org, which works toward getting kids ...