As the technology is advancing day-by-day, the automated systems are slowly replacing the human workers across many industries. Further, a wide spread use of Cyber Physical Systems and Artificial Intelligence in industries are fueling this trend. Industries need people with good knowledge of digital technologies and more importantly the people with good programming or coding skills, so that they can program the computers, the robots or other machines to perform the specific tasks.

Programming has two aspects. First, a programmer should have a good problem solving skills and second, he/she should know the programming languages in which the programs for the computer are written. Program writing or coding is still one of the most desirable and essential skills that a company expects from their aspirants. However, the art of coding should not only be seen as an essential skill to get jobs. Learning to develop a program and accordingly to code it using a particular language greatly enhances the students’ problem solving and critical thinking abilities.

Unfortunately, because of many socio-economic reasons a large population of children in our country do not get opportunity to learn programming skills at the school level by skilled teachers or professionals. Although there are multiple players in the market who have already realized the importance of having programming skills and have started various online classes for the school kids, many students cannot avail their services because of high fee structure.

We at BITS Pilani are always committed to make our contributions for the marginalized ones to promote equality in the society. With this in mind, Teaching Learning Center (TLC), BITS Pilani is organizing a one week programming and coding workshops for the students of age 11-14 years (6th to 9th standard). Considering the pandemic situations, this year it has to be conducted online.