STEM educationStudents to learn coding - rather than a foreign language
Florida lawmakers are about the authorize a measure which would allow students to study computer coding instead of a foreign language. Florida is not the only state considering such a measure, as support for similar changes is growing across the United States. officials in Kentucky, Georgia, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington have also considered substituting foreign language studies with computer coding credits.
Students at work during CodeDay competition // Source: commons.wikimedia.org
Florida lawmakers are about the authorize a measure which would allow students to study computer coding instead of a foreign language.
News Channel 8 reports thatDemocratic State Senator Jeremy Ring, who formerly worked for Yahoo, has been trying to persuade legislators in Tallahassee that students should be able to choose to study coding instead of a traditional foreign language.
Florida is not the only state considering such a measure, as support for similar changes is growing across the United States. President Barack Obama recently called for computer science to join the “three Rs“ — reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Reuters reports that officials in Kentucky, Georgia, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington have also considered substituting foreign language studies with computer coding credits.
Ring said his bill aimed to elevate the emphasis schools in Florida place on computer science. Currently, students mostly take the subject as an elective. Foreign languages are not required to earn a basic state diploma.
“Coding is a language,” said Ring, who got the idea from his 14-year-old son. “It is a global language, more global than French or German or Spanish, or for that matter even English.”
Andrew Ladanowski and his son Jeremy are among those who support the measure.
“It’s very important for me and my son because my son has speech apraxia, so he has a difficulty pronouncing words, pronunciations, as well as a learning disability in respect to speech and language,” Ladanowski told News Channel 8.
“He won’t have the time and energy to excel in the courses that he does. We’d like to maintain those As and Bs in the science, technology and mathematics and we worry that we spend all the time and resources trying to learn this foreign language that those grades will slip and the opportunity of going to college will be diminished.”
