While strides have been made to bring computer science (CS) education to the K-12 classrooms, computer science offerings and instruction in Colorado still trails the national average (Code.org 2022). The ramifications of this gap will grow over time and students from a variety of backgrounds and locations in Colorado will be sidelined from the technology driven, information rich world of the future. If only 42% of high schools in Colorado offer basic computer science instruction and less than half (47%) of districts create those onramps for students (Code.org 2022), a huge number of students will be left years behind their peers if/when they choose to pick up the skills that will be needed in technology jobs of the future; even more important is the fact that if only 66% of students even attend a school with a foundational computer science course that could be taken (Code.org 2022), over a third of high school students in the state run the risk of being either underrepresented or missing from the design and development teams in the future, effectively muting or silencing their perspectives. It is a safe bet that if our high schools aren’t even offering foundational CS courses, they aren’t offering advanced opportunities.

Now, Colorado is a big place. What is more concerning than the straight numbers above is the distribution of where CS is offered across the state. When looking at the map, it becomes clear that students from rural areas in both the east and west side of the continental divide are missing opportunities to be a part of a digital, information rich future. With the tools that exist today, there is no reason that students in these areas can’t have the same access and opportunity that their peers in larger cities do. Coding is impacting all walks of life, and agricultural areas like the eastern plains may see significant disruption in the future due to the dual effects of emerging artificial intelligence and scaling robotics initiatives (Grainger Engineering Office of Marketing and Communications 2020). Those students should have a hand in developing the technologies that may displace traditional jobs in their communities.

Colorado can do better with computer science education offerings for our students, but more importantly – Colorado NEEDS to do better. In a world run on tech, our students shouldn’t be relegated to watching, using, supporting, and being displaced by solutions their peers created simply because we didn’t give them a seat at the table.

Code.org. (2022). Computer Science Access Report Data. Code.org. Retrieved January 29, 2022, from https://lnkd.in/eh3S2tnY

Grainger Engineering Office of Marketing and Communications. (2020, October 29). The future of farming is autonomous. Computer Science | UIUC. Retrieved January 29, 2022, from https://lnkd.in/eN4MFEnJ

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