Hyderabad: 96.7% of government school students clear coding skills test

Hyderabad: Telangana Early Coders (TeC), a programme launched to expose Government school students to coding skills, ended on a triumphant note with 96.7 per cent of the students qualifying in the online assessment test developed by UK based Fusion Practices with University of Texas, Dellas (UTD) Standards that followed the training.

Announcing the results of the TEC at TITA Office here on Thursday, the TITA global president Sundeep Kumar Makthala said the high performance reflected the effort put in by the learners in learning coding skills. The achievement is significant considering that most of the students trained did not have any formal exposure to digital technologies nor did their schools have any infra like computers and internet, he said.

The TeC programme, an initiative of Telangana State Government and implemented by Telangana Information Technology Association (TITA), is part of the efforts to inculcate problem solving skills logical reasoning among students.

The programme was held in two phases in Amarchintha and Atmakur mandals under Makthal constituency of Wanaparthy district.Phase I included a six-day pilot programme, which began on January 6. In this, 54 members from 18 schools have been trained. These members were selected through the Digital Yatra, a digital literacy drive that TITA had conducted. Three members - one teacher, one class VIII student and one class IX student- who are part of the Innovation Club at schools, have been selected for the Phase I of the pilot.

These trained Innovation Club members returned to their respective schools and trained 10 other students. The One TITA mentor supervised the training modules in four schools. The training began on January 17 and went on for two weeks. The students have appeared for the exam online on February 4. UK based Fusion Practices devised a portal as per the standards of Univerity of Texas, Dallas (UTD) in the US for conducting the test. Students getting 10 marks out of 25 are declared as pass. In all 182 students have appeared and 176 students have passed the online assessment test recording 96.7 pass percentage.

TITA president said the students were taught to code without the use of computers through ProGame Kits followed by MIT's scratch and Phython. The students have within a short period created games like apple & ball, rocket launcher, cat & mouse, etc using scratch. The students also programmed a calculator and a quiz module using Python. The average score was 65.13% even as the organizers have kept a threshold of 40% for the candidates to be declared passed in the subject, Makthal said.

TITA's effort in introducing coding skills at schools has been lauded by Wanaparthy district officials. Students who have passed in this examination will be recognized & titled as 'Telangana Early Coder (TeC)'.

Before the programme was launched, a roundtable was held in Hyderabad, which was 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.

TITA, which had earlier conducted digital literacy related events, was selected as the implementing agency for the pilot. Ranjan had also written to Wanaparthy Collector Swetha Mohanty and DEO P Susinder Rao to take up the pilot project.

Makthala said the students from rural areas matched engineering graduates. They have potential to perform if the right support and resources are provided to them. They have designed games on their own. A report on this programme will be made and submitted to the Education Department shortly, he said adding that TITA had provided the required laptops for this training and MV Raman School hosted the event.Wanaparthy DEO Susheender Rao lauded the efforts of TITA in conducting the programme and hoped that it will be scaled up to impact more students. MEO Bhaskar Singh, MV Raman School chariman Sridhar Goud, Suraj and team from ProGame, Sajeed and team from Robokalam, Prism representative Srinivas Goud, Vividha IT Solutions representative Praveen Ganwar, Jnanakar Reddy have aided in the conduct of the pilot. TITA members Nanda Kumar, Shravan, Venkat, Sai, Amar, Shankar, Sameer, Nehmath, Nitish, Harika, Ramya, Vivek, Sai Palerla, Ajaiz Hussain were also part of the pilot.