01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100110 01110101 01110100 01110101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100001

Uhh, what we meant to say was: “The future is now!”

A new bill recently signed into Arkansas state law will require all high schools and charter schools to offer computer science programs. While this law won’t require students to participate, it instead will ensure schools make such classes available for those who want them.

There is a surprising lack of computer science courses taught nationally at a high school level that apply toward graduation requirements. According to itif.org – “Only five percent of U.S. high schools are certified to teach Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science courses, while only 10 percent of U.S. K-12 schools offer any computer science classes at all.” With statistics like that you can see why it’s incredibly exciting to see that Arkansas recognizes the need for classes like this and we hope the rest of the country follows suit.

In today’s job climate the need for a fundamental understanding of computers is growing faster than ever. Introducing classes like this early on is certainly a positive influence for not only students going onto higher education but for those entering the workforce immediately after high school. As someone who had the experience of high school where both “Typing” and “Internet” we offered as classes a mere fourteen years ago (oh man, I’m old), one can only wonder what high school students will be learning in the years to come.

Add to this and other such innovations like the Play-I, a robotic toy designed to teach children as young as five how to code. We dare you to watch this and not order a half a dozen of them for every little one in you life.

Using the ultra visual Blockly developed by Google, kids can program the robots to complete all sorts of tasks. All of this is truly fantastic news but we are reserving the right to be worried that as kids continue to advance technologically we won’t be able to keep up with our “Dern kids” fist-shakes.

h/t exile.is

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How awesome is this new law? Does someone want to buy me some Play-i robots? Do you think it’s possible to overuse online binary translators? 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101110 01110011 01110111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101110 01101111 00101110 Let us know in the comments!