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Education

Indiana Becomes 9th State To Make CS a High School Graduation Requirement 42

Posted by BeauHD from the adapting-to-the-future dept.
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last October, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org publicly called out Indiana in its 2023 State of Computer Science Education report, advising the Hoosier state it needed to heed Code.org's new policy recommendation and "adopt a graduation requirement for all high school students in computer science." Having already joined 49 other Governors who signed a Code.org-organized compact calling for increased K-12 CS education in his state after coming under pressure from hundreds of the nation's tech, business, and nonprofit leaders, Indiana Governor Eric J. Holcomb apparently didn't need much convincing. "We must prepare our students for a digitally driven world by requiring Computer Science to graduate from high school," Holcomb proclaimed in his January State of the State Address. Two months later -- following Microsoft-applauded testimony for legislation to make it so by Code.org partners College Board and Nextech (the Indiana Code.org Regional Partner which is also paid by the Indiana Dept. of Education to prepare educators to teach K-12 CS, including Code.org's curriculum) -- Holcomb on Wednesday signed House Bill 1243 into law, making CS a HS graduation requirement. The IndyStar reports students beginning with the Class of 2029 will be required to take a computer science class that must include instruction in algorithms and programming, computing systems, data and analysis, impacts of computing and networks and the internet.

The new law is not Holcomb's first foray into K-12 CS education. Back in 2017, Holcomb and Indiana struck a deal giving Infosys (a big Code.org donor) the largest state incentive package ever -- $31M to bring 2,000 tech employees to Central Indiana — that also promised to make Indiana kids more CS savvy through the Infosys Foundation USA, headed at the time by Vandana Sikka, a Code.org Board member and wife of Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka. Following the announcement of the now-stalled deal, Holcomb led a delegation to Silicon Valley where he and Indiana University (IU) President Michael McRobbie joined Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi and Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka on a Thought Leader panel at the Infosys Confluence 2017 conference to discuss Preparing America for Tomorrow. At the accompanying Infosys Crossroads 2017 CS education conference, speakers included Sikka's wife Vandana, McRobbie's wife Laurie Burns McRobbie, Nextech President and co-CEO Karen Jung, Code.org execs, and additional IU educators. Later that year, IU 'First Lady' Laurie Burns McRobbie announced that Indiana would offer the IU Bloomington campus as a venue for Infosys Foundation USA's inaugural Pathfinders Summer Institute, a national event for K-12 teacher education in CS that offered professional development from Code.org and Nextech, as well as an unusual circumvent-your-school's-approval-and-name-your-own-stipend funding arrangement for teachers via an Infosys partnership with the NSF and DonorsChoose that was unveiled at the White House.

And that, Schoolhouse Rock Fans, is one more example of how Microsoft's National Talent Strategy is becoming Code.org-celebrated K-12 CS state laws!
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Indiana Becomes 9th State To Make CS a High School Graduation Requirement More

Indiana Becomes 9th State To Make CS a High School Graduation Requirement

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  • What a waste of time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tangential ( 266113 ) on Monday March 18, 2024 @09:03PM (#64326505) Homepage
    Our education system has abandoned most 'life skills'. Those include things that everyone needs to know (basic cooking & cleaning; how to change a tire; how to manage money; etc.) But we're going to have a high school teacher (who usually can't code their way out of a wet paper bag much less design a ui or debug data access code) 'teach' students programming.

    This will probably set the students programming skill back rather than helping them.

    I could see if they wanted to focus on teaching students how to use typical UIs; how to use their devices securely; how to protect their identity; understanding (at a high level) how networks and routers work, etc but having people who can't code (or write user specs or write functional specs or design UIs or test cases) teach students who have no interest (or probably aptitude) in programming is a joke.

    By the time most kids who really want to program have gotten to HS they will have already figured out more than than a HS teacher can teach.

    We continue to degrade our education system a little more each year.

    • My nephews are in school right now, the culinary arts (cooking) are very much still present. Can't say about changing tires or managing money.

    • Re:What a waste of time (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Monday March 18, 2024 @10:13PM (#64326601) Homepage

      When I was in middle school, CS was one of the available electives. I ended up actually being one of the student assistants after the teacher realized that none of the material presented any sort of challenge for me once she'd found out that I was the sysop of a local dial-up BBS and knew how to program (at the time few people referred to it as "coding").

      You might assume I'd have made some sort of profitable career out of being such a child prodigy when it came to computers, but as the Ferengi say, I just never had the lobes for business.

      • Very much the same for me. My high school teacher was barely keeping a chapter ahead of the students in the "BASIC for Dummies" (or whatever the real title was) book we were using. I had already burned through the entire book and had done all the assignments. He tried to give me another textbook to work through and I told him no. I'd already completed more coursework than the rest of the class would the entire term. I'd happily do something challenging but I wasn't going to slog through all the same 10 PRI

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by migos ( 10321981 )
      There's absolutely zero need to teach students how to cook and clean and change tires. Kids can just learn by watching videos online. Older generation didn't have that. Financial literacy on the other hand, absolutely should be included in HS curriculum because students won't be able to navigate the internet for that sort of information. Between the fake influencers touting fake wealth to get rich quick schemes, kids need to learn the basics of budgeting, interest rate, financial planning, etc. As for

      • There's absolutely zero need to teach students how to cook and clean and change tires. Kids can just learn by watching videos online

        This is the absolutly the wrong way to learn anything.

        Financial literacy on the other hand, absolutely should be included in HS curriculum because students won't be able to navigate the internet for that sort of information.

        Math is still a requirement. They haven't taken that away yet.

        Between the fake influencers touting fake wealth to get rich quick schemes, kids need to learn the basics of budgeting, interest rate, financial planning, etc.

        No, they need to understand that it is not a career path. It is something you obtain via luck.

    • It really depends on the region. Standardized tests have done a ton of damage, but I am seeing schools start doing relevant stuff like trades, home ec, cooking, and other items.

      It would be nice to see a course in "common sense" stuff. As mentioned below, changing a tire, balancing a checkbook manually, calculating interest and total debt, how to talk to a police officer, how to de-escalate situations verbally, how to shop for quality stuff, finding resources. Maybe even a course subject line of life skil

      • Standardised tests don't typically do any damage/harm. If anything, due to the "testing effect" (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]), they tend to have a net benefit on learning outcomes.

        What comprehensive, integrated assessment programmes do do, how ever, is reveal just how much students are actually learning. They're also great "social levellers" which give everyone an equal footing, at least in assessment terms, regardless of their SES; This has the advantage over more subjective forms of assessm

      • You're describing the Scouting program which has always existed for the run of the Prussian/Rockefeller education system.

        Parents would rather Instagram than be involved with their kids.

        They figure they can always get on welfare.

      • What's a checkbook?

    • I see it as like teaching a language that very few people actually ever use. Imagine if states made learning Swahili compulsory in schools. Just under 90 million people speak Swahili as first or second language but it's also used extensively in applied linguistics research to study foreign language learning. There's a good argument that learning a language like Swahili as it is a lingua franca that has many elements from a diverse range of languages, e.g. Arabic, English, Portuguese, Hindustani, Persian,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cob666 ( 656740 )

      Our education system has abandoned most 'life skills'

      I'm in complete agreement with you. Just because basically everyone uses some kind of computing device doesn't mean that everyone has to know how to program it. Those same people use electricity and plumbing everyday as well but the education system doesn't require they learn how to wire a fuse box, or design a functional sewage ventilation system.

      There is however one thing that students need to learn about, money and finances. I know so many younger people that have never seen their bank account statem

    • Our education system has abandoned most 'life skills'. Those include things that everyone needs to know (basic cooking & cleaning; how to change a tire; how to manage money; etc.) But we're going to have a high school teacher (who usually can't code their way out of a wet paper bag much less design a ui or debug data access code) 'teach' students programming.

      Most high school science teachers aren't chemists, either, but they're trained in teaching the principles for a student to understand the basics of

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      I took a number of programming classes in high school. There were always kids in there that thought they wanted to learn the skill but they clearly didn't have the mind for it. They struggled to get through the class and teacher sympathy on a specialized class is what got them passing grades, not an ability to pick up the skill. Programming is a very logical field. If you don't have the brains for it, you don't have the brains for it.

    • Take a look at the other "graduation requirements" and understand what a meaningless thing this is - basic math & reading/writing skills are also "graduation requirements" yet countless "graduates" find themselves spending a significant part of their first year in college in REMEDIAL math & English classes, struggling to perform at the level "required" to graduate high school.

      This is nothing more than a way for teachers to earn bonuses and stipends for being certified to teach Python to high school

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xeoron ( 639412 )
      Sounds like you need a better school board or state laws. My local High School offers a cooking class with an award winning Chef, an auto shop class with a motorhead that use to build race cars, wood shop class that builds sheds to any number of things (if the school needs something custom made they do it and they learn how to patch holes in walls in the building), agriculture course for anyone that wants to learn about plants or get into landscaping, an AP nursing class taught by a local hospital nurse, di

  • So instead of having an unemployed arts graduate as a barista I will get a highschool drop-out who failed grasp recursion and generics. Any IT course that everyone passes is worthless to industry and hence the economy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Any IT course that everyone passes is worthless to industry and hence the economy.

      Actually of negative worth. First, people could have learned something useful in that time. And second, some will use their "skills" and do damage.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by migos ( 10321981 )
        So we shit on attempt to train domestic workforce, but also shit on hiring immigrants to do the job. At some point it just seems like old farts trying to make themselves feel special and needed. At the minimum, some sort of intro to CS or computer literacy class can inspire some kids to go down the field in the future. You really expect a kid can become sysadmin after taking some intro class about computers?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cob666 ( 656740 )
          You can NOT train someone effectively in a subject that have no interest in. I have no objection with teaching rudimentary development or computer logic courses in grade school, but make in elective so only those really interested will take it.
  • I'm from Indiana and am sometimes ashamed of some of the crap they do. I took a fortran class in 1976 in HS, they just started offering it. Keypunch machine in the class and cards were taken downtown to run and printouts returned next day. I even got a chance to go downtown to finish an extra credit program of like 700 lines(cards). It was a cool idea, as was the 2 years of chemistry I took. These things allowed me to test out of a year of calc, a semester of chem and jump into sophomore level programming m

  • I wish a lot more stuff was a graduation requirement. For starters high school let me out with these terrible English language (and grammar) skills, long held as a graduation requirement. Now imagine what the programming language skills of the average high school graduate looks like.

  • Arkansas has removed algebra from their graduation requirements.

  • #define PI 3.2

    /ducks

  • We still graduate people who can't even read.

    So we're going to teach everybody to code (including the ones who can't read)? Okay.

    I"m sure their pronouns will pass muster though.

  • dont force it on people who dont want to do it

  • With so many stupid social / DEI initiatives competing for student time, while we fail at the basics of reading / writing and arithmetic, this is moronic. The US education system ranks #13 in the developed world https://www.datapandas.org/ran... [datapandas.org] and forcing CS won't improve the rank.. Lack of fundamentals is a core flaw that permeates through all disciplines and handicaps US workers for life VS their foreign counterparts, who are competitors in a global economy. Most of us here know that programing is a
  • Soon English will consist mainly of "How to phrase your question correctly to get the response you desire from chatGPT"

  • I'm sitting here at a regular day job that does not require much computer skill, so maybe my view is slanted from the rest here, but I don't get everyone decrying this as dumb.

    I would venture to guess that the average adult doesn't know a bit from a byte, so at least Indiana is trying to bridge that gap. I imagine this isn't going to be a coding camp type school or anything like that, just a basics of computer science. With the way the world is so reliant on computers, I consider this a good step, kind of

  • Just another education fad, enshrined in law by the ignorant trying to appear smart and with it.

  • Indiana is a pretty white state.

    Just walk around any tech campus and read up a little bit on how they're now required to do hiring: you'll find maybe 5 people were born int he US, and 4 of them will be women of minority status.

    I'm not sure there's much of a return, here. Racial-based hiring practices in tech is the #1 reason why Indians and Asians are a good 2-3 percentiles higher in income than all other demographics in this country.

  • This is very cool news. This is a step forward in providing for students. I often asked for essay writing, used https://papersowl.com/blog/how-to-write-an-academic-essay [papersowl.com] for this. All in order to devote time to programming. In the end, I didn’t do it in vain; now I have a good job.

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