Until recently, S. Dhibeka, 16, who had never used a computer until she chose the computer science stream last year at the aging, leafy Kakkalur Government Higher Secondary School near Chennai, could practise programming for only an hour or two a week, often sharing a desktop computer with one or more of her classmates.
But since September, when the class XII students at the school became early recipients of free laptops from the Tamil Nadu government—in an initiative described as a first for government giveaways, and one that could inspire similar incentives in other states— Dhibeka has been honing her coding skills at home, and she can use her own machine for the once-a-week practical sessions at school, thanks to her computer science teacher, who loaded the C and C++ programming languages onto the laptops. |
