96.7% students clear online Telangana Early Coders pilot programme

Hyderabad: te (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 students in learning coding skills. The achievement was 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 and implemented by Telangana Information Technology Association (TITA), is part of the efforts to inculcate problem solving skills and 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 were trained. These members were selected through the Digital Yatra, a digital literacy drive that TITA had conducted. Three members - one teacher, a class VIII student and a 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. A TITA mentor supervised the training modules in four schools. The training began on January 17 and went on for two weeks. The students appeared for the exam online on February 4. UK-based Fusion Practices devised a portal as per the standards of University of Texas, Dallas (UTD) in the US for conducting the test. Students getting 10 marks out of 25 were declared as pass. In all, 182 students appeared and 176 students 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 Python. The students 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 per cent even as the organisers kept a threshold of 40 per cent for the candidates to be declared passed in the subject, Makthala said.

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