The case for making computer science a high school requirement

Voluntary initiatives to get kids interested in coding are not enough

Girls Who Code
(Image credit: (AP Photo/Eric Risberg))

After an entire weekend spent reading up on for loops and while loops, I sat frustrated, literally wanting to bang my head against a wall. I was 19 years old, a week in to my first computer science class ever, and I had no idea how I would be able to successfully finish the project my class had been assigned.

We were told to build a "Gumball Machine" in Python — the professor's way of putting a cutesy spin on us learning to code a series of arbitrary requirements. The program we had to build would randomly choose numbers that were assigned to colors of gumballs. There was to be a specific number for each color — seven yellow, eight green, three blue, etc., but most importantly, one red. The program would run continuously, choosing gumball after gumball, until it reached the sole red gumball. At that point, it would tally up the total number of points from every gumball it chose and give you the total number of points from that round.

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Hayley Munguia is an intern at TheWeek.com. She is currently studying New Media Journalism at NYU and has previously written for the Jerusalem Post, the Austin-American Statesman and This Is NYU.