Reporters examine the push for coding in school curricula

The industry-backed nonprofit Code.org announced itself a few years ago by posting a 6-minute video called “What most schools don’t teach.” Using enthusiastic testimonials from Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and others, and conveyed with youthful optimism, the online ad—which now has more than 13.6 million views—argues that schools should teach a “new superpower”: coding.

The coding push isn’t new. In a recent New York Times article that expanded the campaign’s visibility, reporter Natasha Singer stipulated that for years before Code.org emerged, similar advocacy had been seen from NSF, from industry, and from education experts.

Code.org lists six organizations—including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—that have contributed at least $3 million apiece. Six individuals or couples, including Bill Gates and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, have contributed at least $1 million apiece. Singer reports that total contributions now exceed $60 million, that two dozen states have changed “their education policies and laws,” that more than 100 million students worldwide have tried free introductory coding lessons called Hour of Code , and that Code.org has trained more than 57 000 teachers in workshops. She emphasizes Code.org’s sophistication, and notes that the organization’s efforts coincide “with a larger tech-industry push to remake American primary and secondary schools with computers and learning apps, a market estimated to reach $21 billion by 2020.”

The Times headlined Singer’s piece “How Silicon Valley pushed coding into American classrooms.” It begins by reporting that at a White House meeting of information technology leaders, Apple CEO Tim Cook advised that to engage a “huge deficit in the skills that we need today,” coding “should be a requirement in every public school.” Industry interest, she wrote, has risen with administration efforts to limit immigration. Information technology companies need software engineers.

Recent media coverage underlines the proliferation of efforts to promote coding. WeeklyObserver.com says that in Canada, coding will be taught from kindergarten through high school. A Miami Herald headline reported “Tech groups team up to offer high school coding program.” At BBC, it was “£1.3m to expand school computer coding clubs in Wales.”

Education Week offered “9 tips for teaching coding in the classroom .” Its article “Libraries as hubs for coding? ” engages an issue that comes up frequently in the media coverage: access to coding instruction for “girls, students from low-income families, and students of color.” That piece reports a $500 000 competitive grant program from Google and the American Library Association. It quotes an association official’s assertion, commonly heard from others as well, that coding develops analytical skills that are generally applicable even outside the information technology realm.

Diversity, access, and funding figure prominently in the broader coverage. A Wall Street Journal article , under the headline “Free NYC coding school launches funding experiment,” with the subhead “Nonprofit serving low-income adults taps students’ earnings, private investors,” mused that if “this newfangled funding model works, it could help nonprofit coding schools across the U.S. expand.” A Sacramento Bee headline on a coding piece asked, “This week of summer camp costs as much as a month’s rent. Why is demand so high?” The Bee reported that “hundreds of private companies have popped up throughout the nation offering coding classes and summer camps with varying levels of difficulty and costs.” An Albuquerque Journal article examined new opportunities “for adults through mobile classes taught directly in under-served rural and urban areas.” CNBC reported that former eBay chief technology officer Alice Hill seeks to increase the proportion of women working in information technology. At the Times, Singer cited the organizations Black Girls Code , Girls Who Code , and Latina Girls Code .

The coding campaign embraces more than school curricula. It’s also about educational toys. Here’s the opening of the Wired article “Get your kids coding with Sony’s clever building blocks”:

Enthusiastic coverage of Koov also appeared at the Huffington Post. A similar article at Digital Trends placed Koov into a wider commercial context, reporting that thanks “in part to new toy lines from Walmart, Toys ‘R’ US, and Amazon’s curatorial STEM Club subscription service, the STEM toy market is projected to make up two to three percent of the $20 billion U.S. toy market.”

Singer sees “little public awareness” of the coding campaign. She points to legislation that was introduced in Idaho “that, education researchers warned, could prioritize industry demands over students’ interests. Among other things, they said, it could sway schools to teach specific computer programming languages that certain companies needed, rather than broader problem-solving approaches that students might use throughout their lives.” Singer quoted the bill, which was eventually enacted: “It is essential that efforts to increase computer science instruction, kindergarten through career, be driven by the needs of industry and be developed in partnership with industry.” Singer also cited a bill in Florida “that would have required students to obtain industry certification.” Bills have also appeared “that would allow coding courses to count toward foreign-language credits in high schools.”

At least one information technology leader sees historic import in all of this. Singer reports that Microsoft president Bradford L. Smith sees a parallel to the nationwide push for better science education that followed the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1.

Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.