Today Code.org announced the launch of a new computer science course, CS Discoveries, to be introduced over 800 classrooms this upcoming school year. The nonprofit hopes the course will fill a much-need gap in computer science curriculum for grades 7-9, teaching students web design, game and app creation, and physical computing.
About 800 teachers, coming from low-income public schools, are participating in a professional learning program and will begin teaching the course to over 30,000 students. Through these lessons, Code.org aims to give a more diverse group of students the opportunity to create with technology. For the students in those classes, the nonprofit is also giving away or subsidizing Arduino boards that students can use to program hardware projects.
The program seems to have strong supporters, as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram’s Kevin Systrom both appear in the promotion video. This support from tech leaders comes as no surprise as others including Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella called President Trump last week to ramp up the technology workforce, noting bipartisan agreement from government and private sector actors to educate and train the future workforce.
