Telangana Early Coders (TeC), a program launched to expose government school students to coding skills, ended on a triumphant note with 96.7% of the students qualifying in the online assessment test developed by UK-based Fusion Practices in accordance with the standards of the University of Texas, Dallas (UTD), following the training.
Announcing the results of the TeC at the Telangana Information Technology Association (TITA) office on Thursday, TITA Global President Sundeep Kumar Makthala said that the high performance reflected the effort put in by the learners in learning coding skills.
The achievement was significant considering that most of the students trained did not have any formal exposure to digital technologies previously nor did their schools have any infrastructure like computers or the Internet, he said.
The TeC program, an initiative of the Telangana state government and implemented by TITA, is part of the efforts to inculcate problem-solving skills and logical reasoning among students.
The program was held in two phases in Amarchintha and Atmakur mandals under Makthal constituency of Wanaparthy district.
Phase I included a six-day pilot program, which began on January 6. In this, 54 members from 18 schools were trained. These members were selected through Digital Yatra, a digital literacy drive that TITA had conducted. Three members - one teacher, one class VIII student and one class IX student - who were part of the innovation clubs at their schools, were selected for Phase I.
These trained innovation club members returned to their respective schools and trained 10 other students. One TITA mentor supervised the training modules in four schools. The training began on January 17 and went on for two weeks.
The TITA president said that the students were taught to code without the use of computers through ProGame Kits followed by MIT's Scratch and Python. The students within a short period created games like apple & ball, rocket launcher, cat & mouse etc using Scratch. They also programmed a calculator and a quiz module using Python.
The students appeared for the online assessment exam on February 4. UK-based Fusion Practices devised a portal as per the standards of the University of Texas, Dallas (UTD), for conducting the test. Students getting 10 marks out of 25 (40%) were declared as passed. In all 182 students appeared and 176 students passed the online assessment test, recording a 96.7 pass percentage. The average score was 65.13%.
Students who passed in this examination will be recognized as "Telangana Early Coder (TeC)".
TITA's effort in introducing coding skills at the school level has been lauded by the Wanaparthy district officials.
Before the program was launched, a round-table was held in Hyderabad, headed by the then education department Secretary Janardhan Reddy and IT Principal Secretary Jayesh Ranjan.
Several coding-related companies too have been stakeholders in this.