Delhi government, HT team up to train students in coding

The Delhi government and Hindustan Times have some together to announce the Hindustan Times Codeathon that will help students learn how to code better. Announcing the launch of the Hindustan Times Codeathon on Thursday, Delhi’s deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said that students participating in India’s biggest coding Olympiad will fill the gap in technology-related education in Delhi’s government schools.

The Delhi government has partnered with Hindustan Times to train 12,000 students from its schools in coding.

“Modern technology-related education is what is missing from our system. With this programme, we will train our students as professionals of tomorrow. Our government was working on computer labs when we were approached by She Codes to train girl children in coding. Once the foundation was laid, then came the partnership with Hindustan Times to challenge our students in coding,” Sisodia said speaking at the Veer Savarkar Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya in Kalkaji on Thursday.

The Hindustan Times Codeathon launch saw Udit Prakash Rai, Delhi’s director of education, Rajeev Beotra, senior executive director of Hindustan Times, and Rupinder Kaur, founder-president of the She Codes training programme in attendance.

“Now that there is excitement about coding in our schools, I received a call from an Indian-origin technocrat from the United States to work with our teacher and students and mentor them in coding. Everything fit in place at the right time,” Sisodia said.

The HT Codeathon will help provide students from classes 6 to class 9 from across India a virtual platform where they can learn coding in languages such as HTML, CSS and Python. Once the tutorials and quizzes are over, the students will be scored and the top 100 performers will participate in a finale that will take place in December this year.

Six students from class 6 who have learned some coding under the She Codes programme that was launched in January this year, presented short animated videos made by them at the launch event. These videos revolved around important topics like good touch and bad touch, the need for conservation, educating the girl child, and awareness about Covid-19.

“We have seen in these videos how coding promotes thinking, and creatively presenting messages. There was a video where the girl child says she is helpless, and all I could think was that now she is not helpless — she is a coder,” Sisodia said while speaking about these videos.

“This was a small dream for our education department, and a big step for our students. I am a student of a government school from Uttar Pradesh and saw a computer for the first time when I went to study engineering. Today children in our schools are learning how to code. This will promote a coding culture in our schools. This process should not end in the next two or three months, it should be continuous,” said Udit Prakash Rai, director, education.

“The students will have to just register and start learning through an interactive platform that will have many videos, tests and tools. The programme will train children in classes 6 and 7 in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and those in classes 8 and 9 in Python as well. Every student will have a personalised dashboard that will track the progress of the students. This dashboard will be accessible to the parents and teachers as well to know how the students are performing. And, there will be a leaderboard with the rank of the student,” Rajeev Beotra, senior executive director of Hindustan Times, said.

Over 22,000 students have already registered for the Hindustan Times Codeathon, which will provide training, mentorship from technical experts, and also opportunities to win laptops or smartwatches as prizes at the end of it.