With Codechef For Schools, Directi Aims To Get More Indian Students Involved In Programming

Directi’s Codechef is billed as an educational platform for aspiring programmers and developers. The site is sort of a social learning experiences where programmers can learn, practise and compete in programming challenges and contests. Directi has now announced that they will be bringing Codechef to school kids in the country by launching Codechef for schools.

Codechef for Schools is a non-commercial initiative by the company and its aim is to create a community of Indian kids who are exposed to programming at an early age, so that India can stay at the forefront of the tech revolution. ‘Go for Gold’ is an extension of this program which will enable talented students to compete with the top student programmer of the world at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC).

Codechef approaches programming from a competitive angle, strongly believing that self-learning and the challenges can help more Indian school kids get solve existing problems or create new innovative software. The program will targeting school kids from Class 8th onwards. In addition, the program has also pledged a yearly support of $20,000 to get more kids to go ahead and learn code. The fund and support will go towards sponsorships, infrastructure support and cash prizes in contests.

Mr. Bhavin Turakhia, Founder & CEO of Directi spoke about this new program,

“CodeChef provides a platform for practice, competition and improvement for student and professional software developers across India. In India, there is a clear dearth of platforms that encourage school students to take computer programming seriously. Combine this with the lack of awareness amongst Indian students, and the existing curriculum in most schools and colleges, it does not truly recreate real world scenarios that allow budding software developers to collaborate with professionals. The CodeChef platform aims to reach out to school students, while young and create a culture of programming in the country.

Since the time, we have started playing a part in spreading awareness about competitive programming; we have received tremendous response from Indian college students. Almost 1,20,000 students are registered on our CodeChef platform, since 2009, and have tried to better  their performance through our mentoring, tech-talks, meet-ups, training workshops, encouragement to students to host their own competitions, etc.”

With the way the tech industry is growing every year, I do see an immediate future where every professional will probably need to know about programming as a requisite for their jobs. While India does have good developer talent, it is evident that we need more people on that front, especially people who have been exposed to programming at a young age and have the ability to solve complex technological problems that companies face these days. It is also good for the startup ecosystem in India. Talented students with business acumen can start their own ventures and help create a much better startup ecosystem than what exists right now.

Website | Codechef for Schools

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