Coding classes will soon be offered to upper primary school students in Singapore, in a bid to “develop a healthy pipeline of tech talent for the digital economy”.

The announcement was made today (10 Jul) by Minister for Communications and Information S Iswaran at the Ministry of Communication and Information (MCI)’s workplan seminar.

The 10-hour enrichment programme will be piloted this year at some schools for pupils after their PSLE exams, and will be rolled out to all primary schools by 2020.

The programme, called Code For Fun (CFF), will be conducted by the Ministry of Education and IMDA.

CFF will help students “develop an appreciation of core computational thinking and coding concepts” via simple visual programming-based lessons.

Mr Iswaran stated that CFF “will seek to excite young Singaporeans about the opportunities in the digital age and expose them to the skill sets needed for the potentially lucrative digital economy”.

CFF isn’t entirely new, however, as the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI) shared that the programme was launched as an optional enrichment programme in 2014, and has benefited 93,000 students to date.

The programme will continue at secondary level to complement computing education which includes computing subjects taken at O and A-Levels, but this will be optional.

The Cyber Security Agency (CSA) will also be expanding its youth engagement outreach with the Singapore Cyber Youth Programme (SG Cyber Youth) by reaching out to 10,000 secondary and tertiary level students in the next three years to provide them with “opportunities to explore cyber security as a career and expose them to relevant technical knowledge and soft skills”.

A new advanced level of the Youth Cyber Exploration Programme (YCEP), which aims to introduce secondary schools students to cybersecurity as a career, will also be launched next year.

MCI added that students can look forward to more cybersecurity learning journeys, and that “more initiatives will be announced next year”.

Featured Image Credit: Seng Kang Primary School