New laws, investments and partnerships are prioritizing high school instruction in computer science
In an effort to make skills-building in secondary education more applicable to modern workforce needs, a growing number of states are requiring students to complete a computer science course in order to graduate from high school.
During a session at The Council of State Governments’ Midwestern Legislative Conference Annual Meeting in Saskatchewan, legislators explored the reasonings behind this policy shift, as well as the future direction of computer science instruction.
“We require students to learn about their natural world, their government world, but we don’t always require them to learn about our technological world,” said Julia Wynn, director of state government affairs at the nonprofit Code.org and one of the featured presenters at the session hosted by the MLC Education & Workforce Committee.
Officers of the Midwestern Legislative Conference Education & Workforce Committee at the 2025 MLC Annual Meeting. From left to right: Minnesota Rep. Bernie Perryman, Nebraska Sen. Jana Hughes, and Kansas Rep. Mari-Lynn Poskin.
She explained that computer science education is not about teaching students how to use Google or Microsoft Office, but rather “evaluating, assessing and very much problem solving with technology.”
To date, three Midwestern states have laws requiring high school students to complete a course in computer science education: Indiana, Nebraska and North Dakota. (Bills also were introduced this year in Illinois, Iowa and Ohio.)
In many U.S. states with these new graduation requirements, full implementation is still years away. However, under North Dakota’s HB 1398 of 2023, completion of a computer science (or cybersecurity) course is a prerequisite for the graduating class of 2026.
According to a 2024 University of Maryland study that Wynn referenced in her presentation, taking a high school computer science class “raised students’ likelihood of being employed by 2.6 percentage points and annual earnings by about 8 percent at age 24.”
Wynn also believes these learned skillsets, be they data programming, developing algorithms or understanding ethical computer usage, are still relevant even in an age where artificial intelligence is beginning to supplant some of the tasks previously completed by human programmers.
“[Computer science] is going to evolve to be less focused on text-based syntax coding and more focused on computational thinking and AI literacy.”
For some policymakers, however, the leap to mandating computer science education is still too great given the complication of, for example, existing teacher shortages and technology costs.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, of the total number of teacher candidates who completed a traditional preparation program in academic-year 2020, only around 0.03 percent were intending to teach computer science.
As such, some schools are partnering with outside groups to help provide instruction in computer science, AI and even robotics.
SaskCode, a brainchild of the nonprofit Saskatoon Industry Education Council, is one such program.
Funded in part by seed money from the federal CanCode initiative, SaskCode provides professional development opportunities for teachers wanting to learn more about computer science pedagogy. It also supplies partnered classrooms with age-appropriate educational kits related to robotics and computational thinking.
“Before a teacher actually does a program, they have to take a workshop [with us],” said Janet Uchacz-Hart, the council’s executive director and the other featured presenter at the session.
“They have to understand the importance of computer science and computational thinking as well as how [to] use that particular robot at that particular time.”
Uchacz-Hart said these outside services are especially appreciated in Saskatchewan’s rural and First Nation communities, where teacher recruitment is more difficult and SaskCode’s lessons complement other career development programs offered by the council for students in grades 10 to 12.
