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Illinois guarantees your child the chance to take computer science. Only the chance.
The short answer
The Education and Workforce Equity Act gives every Illinois student the opportunity to take at least one computer science course from the 2023 to 2024 school year. That is a floor, not a ceiling, and many students clear it in a term. Modern Age Coders teaches what comes next, live, for ages 6 to 67, in batches of five to eight or privately, at USD 100 and USD 150 a month. The opening class is free.
Illinois did something unusually decent in 2021. Rather than leaving computer science to whichever districts could afford it, the state legislated an entitlement, so that access would not depend on a postcode. It was the right instinct and it has moved real numbers. What it cannot legislate is depth, and depth is what a motivated student runs out of first.
This page sets out exactly what Illinois law requires, what Chicago requires on top of it, and where a family who has already used up the school's provision can go next. Illinois sits within our United States coverage.
No card. No obligation. We call, we do not spam.
Where a student goes after the one course the law guarantees
These are the courses that live above the entitlement floor. All four are built on data that was not invented for a lesson.
AI and ML for teens
Models built and evaluated by hand before any library is allowed near them.
See the syllabus
Data science for teens
Real datasets with real traps inside them, worked in Python and pandas.
See the syllabus
AP Computer Science A
Java, the exam unit structure, and the free response questions that decide the grade.
See the syllabus
Statistics and probability
The reasoning that stops a confident wrong conclusion from a correct calculation.
See the syllabusThat is four of more than a hundred. The rest, sorted by age and subject, sit on the course atlas, and the order we teach them in is on the coding roadmap.
The four we are known for
Python, AI, vibe coding and agentic coding
These run underneath everything above. Every one is live and online, placed by ability rather than by age, and the first class is free.
An entitlement, and what an entitlement is not
HB 2170, the Education and Workforce Equity Act, was signed in March 2021 and championed by the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus. Its computer science provisions are among the most concrete in any state.
| Requirement | From |
|---|---|
| Every student offered the opportunity to take at least one computer science course aligned to rigorous learning standards | 2023 to 2024 school year |
| High school students take one year of a course that includes intensive instruction in computer literacy | 2022 to 2023 school year |
| Districts ensure students gain computer literacy skills beginning in elementary school | Ongoing |
| State Board of Education develops computer science learning standards | Delivered by end of 2021 |
Now read the first row again, carefully. The obligation is to offer the opportunity. That was a deliberate and defensible choice: the aim was to remove the situation where a child in one district has computer science and a child twenty minutes away has none. As an equity floor it is genuinely good policy, and we are not going to sneer at it in order to sell something.
But a floor is a floor. The law does not say the course must be taught by somebody who has written software. It does not say what happens in year two for the student who finished year one in October. And it does not say the course has to lead anywhere. In practice a capable fourteen year old often exhausts what their school can offer inside a single term and then sits still for three years, which is precisely the point at which most of our Illinois families first call us.
Chicago went further, earlier
Chicago Public Schools made computer science a high school graduation requirement in 2016, ahead of the state and ahead of almost every large district in the United States. That is a district rule, not a state one. A student in Naperville, Schaumburg or Aurora falls under the state provisions instead. Illinois is a patchwork by design, so check what applies to your own school rather than to Illinois in general.
One more thing, and we will be unhelpfully honest about it. It is widely reported that an AP computer science course may count toward the three years of mathematics required for graduation in Illinois. We could not confirm the current provision at primary source, so we will not state it as settled. Ask your counsellor to show you the rule that applies to your child's cohort. We have seen enough families plan around a half-remembered version of a rule to think this matters.
What comes after the one course the law guarantees
The pairing below is deliberately arranged around the gap rather than around the entitlement. On the left is what a student typically has after school has done its statutory duty. On the right is where we take them next.
Computer literacy. Files, documents, spreadsheets, safe behaviour online. Required of every Illinois high school student since 2022 to 2023.
Useful, and not programming. We treat it as the prerequisite it is and move a student on to writing instructions a machine executes. See Kids Coding Blocks Masterclass.
One introductory computer science course, often the only one the timetable can carry.
The second course, and the third. Python to real depth rather than a second tour of loops and conditionals. See Python Complete Masterclass for Teens.
Anything involving real data. Introductory courses almost never reach a dataset that was not invented for the lesson.
Our Illinois project uses live Chicago civic data with a genuine modelling trap in it, described below. See Data Science for Teens.
Machine learning taught as mathematics rather than as an API call.
Models built and evaluated by hand before any library appears, so a student knows what accuracy is actually measuring. See AI and ML for Teens.
The mathematics underneath, taught alongside rather than years later.
Statistics and probability run on the same track as the coding, with the same teacher. See Statistics and Probability.
High school
Ages 14 to 18
College and adult
18 to 67
The complete catalogue is on the course atlas, with the teaching method on how we teach.
A model that is right 95 percent of the time and completely useless
The Illinois project is the one that fools students who already know some machine learning, and a fair number of adults who build it for a living. It runs on the city's beach water records.
The Chicago Park District monitors water quality at the Lake Michigan beaches, testing for Escherichia coli as an indicator of disease-causing bacteria, and issues a swim advisory when the predicted level reaches at least 235 Colony Forming Units per 100 millilitres. The city publishes the lab results, the advisories and the model predictions as open data, updated daily through the beach season. It has also run the forecasting problem publicly, working with volunteer data scientists and university students to improve on it.
So a student has a genuine, consequential classification problem with real data: given today's conditions, will this beach need an advisory? They build a model. It reports something like ninety-five percent accuracy. That feels like success, and in a school project it would be graded like success.
The trap
Most beach-days are fine. If advisories are issued on roughly one day in twenty, then a model that ignores every input and answers "safe" every single time is also about ninety-five percent accurate. It has learned nothing, it will never issue a warning, and it scores the same as the student's model. Accuracy on an imbalanced problem measures the imbalance, not the model.
This is the moment the project earns its place, because the student now has to find out what to measure instead. They meet the confusion matrix, and then precision and recall, not as vocabulary but as the answer to a question they actually have. They discover that the two kinds of mistake are not equivalent: a false alarm closes a beach on a good day, while a missed advisory sends children into contaminated water. Any honest evaluation has to weigh those differently, and deciding how to weigh them is not a mathematical question at all.
That last point is the one we most want a fourteen year old to carry away. There is a step in every serious machine learning problem where the mathematics stops and somebody has to make a judgement about consequences. Pretending that step does not exist is how models get deployed badly.
| Step | What the student does | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|
| Build | Train a classifier and report its accuracy | Get the naive success on the record first |
| Beat | Compare it against a model that always answers "safe" | A baseline is how you know if you have anything |
| Count | Lay out true and false positives and negatives | One number was hiding four |
| Weigh | Argue which error is worse here and by how much | The cost of an error is a human judgement |
| Re-report | State performance using measures that survive imbalance | Choose the metric to fit the problem |
Older students go on to threshold tuning and to why the 235 figure is itself a policy decision rather than a natural constant. Younger ones stop after the baseline comparison, which is already the most useful hour of machine learning they will have had. Students pull current data from the Chicago portal themselves; nothing here is a number copied off a web page.
This runs directly into AI and ML for teens and, at college level, data science. Students who want to build models across markets can also read AI and machine learning in the USA. Completed work sits in the student labs.
What an Illinois family is buying
A teacher who codes
Live for the full hour, watching the student work. The single most common thing we hear from Illinois parents is that the school course was taught by somebody teaching it for the first time.
Somewhere to go next
The entitlement gets a student one course. We are built as a ladder, so finishing something is followed by starting the next thing rather than by waiting.
Five to eight, one teacher
Groups stay small and keep the same teacher every week. Private tuition is available where a student needs the whole hour to themselves.
Real data, not toy data
Every project uses something that exists outside the lesson. The Chicago beach problem above is a live civic modelling question, not an exercise invented to have a tidy answer.
Maths on the same track
Statistics and probability taught beside the coding by the same teacher, because a student who cannot reason about proportion cannot evaluate a model.
Nothing to install
Browser based throughout. A laptop or desktop, a microphone and a working connection is the entire list, which matters on a locked-down school device.
When you probably do not need us
Illinois provision is uneven, and in the direction that matters for the families most likely to be reading this page. Several of the suburban districts with the largest South Asian communities also run genuinely strong computer science programmes, with teachers who write software and a sequence that continues past the introductory course. If that describes your school, paying us to duplicate it would be a poor use of your money and we would rather say so.
Four questions will tell you which situation you are in. Ask the school, not the internet.
| Ask the school | What the answer tells you |
|---|---|
| Which computer science courses run this year, and which ran last year? | A single course that appears and disappears is a staffing gap, not a programme |
| What does a student take in the year after the introductory course? | If the answer is nothing, that is the year we exist for |
| Has the teacher written software outside a classroom? | Not disqualifying, but it changes how far a keen student can be taken |
| Does any course reach data that was not invented for the lesson? | This is the single biggest difference between a course and an exercise |
If the answers are good, use the school. Come to us for the mathematics if that is where the gap is, or come back when your child has run past what the timetable can hold. If the answers are thin, you now know precisely what you are buying from us rather than buying on a feeling.
Monthly, in US dollars
No enrolment charge, nothing to buy, no minimum term.
Five to eight learners with one consistent teacher. Where most Illinois families begin.
One learner setting the pace. Usually chosen where a student has already outrun their school by some distance.
Pauses, plan changes and missed classes are covered on the pricing page.
What families say
Rated 4.9 across 547 Google reviews. These are real reviews, reproduced as written.
★★★★★
"The one step solution for my son. Modern Age Coders make learning coding so simple that kids love it. The teachers explain complex concepts clearly with practical exercises and interactive content."
Ria Mukherjee
Parent
★★★★★
"Modern Age Coders has been a game-changer for me. I struggled to grasp IT concepts and coding before joining, but their classes transformed everything. I can now confidently write complex programs with ease."
Samriddha Mondal
Student
★★★★★
"One of the most wonderful education centres out there. Education is not limited to school syllabus but focuses on skill development."
Vansh Agarwal
Student
★★★★★
"My child Dhairya is really enjoying the Modern Age Coders classes. This is his first online class and he eagerly looks forward to it. I can already see his improvement, and the teachers are very cooperative."
Sonam Oswal
Parent of Dhairya
★★★★★
"Modern Age Coders have wonderful teachers who teach in a clear, easy and practical way. The teacher boosts students' confidence and inspires them to learn without hesitation."
Sonu Goyal
Parent
★★★★★
"I highly recommend this computer coding class! The teachers are incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about coding."
Ritu Kedia
Parent
More, with photographs and student work, on the wall of love.
Illinois questions, answered plainly
What does HB 2170 actually require of Illinois schools?
HB 2170, the Education and Workforce Equity Act, was signed in March 2021 and championed by the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus. It requires schools to offer every student the opportunity to take at least one computer science course aligned to rigorous standards from the 2023 to 2024 school year, obliges the State Board of Education to write those standards, and requires high school students to take one year of a course that includes intensive instruction in computer literacy from the 2022 to 2023 school year.
If the law already guarantees a course, why would we pay for another?
Because the law creates an entitlement to be offered a course, which is not the same as a good course, a teacher who codes, or a class that goes anywhere. It is a floor deliberately set so that no Illinois student is denied access. Families come to us when a child has cleared that floor in a term and there is nothing above it, which in many districts happens quickly.
Is computer science required to graduate in Chicago?
Chicago Public Schools made computer science a high school graduation requirement in 2016, ahead of the state and ahead of almost every large district in the country. That is a district requirement rather than a statewide one, so a student in Naperville, Schaumburg or Aurora is under the state rules instead. Confirm the position with your own school, because Illinois is a patchwork by design.
Does an AP computer science course count toward the Illinois maths requirement?
It is widely reported that it can count toward the three years of mathematics required for graduation, but we could not confirm the current provision at primary source and we are not going to state it as settled. Ask your school counsellor to show you the rule in force for your child's cohort. We would rather be unhelpfully honest here than helpfully wrong.
Do you teach across Illinois or only Chicago?
The whole state, and the distinction stops mattering the moment teaching is live over video. Chicago, Naperville, Schaumburg, Aurora, Peoria, Springfield and Champaign are all the same to us. The requirements are a laptop or desktop, a microphone and a connection good enough for a call. Nothing is posted and nothing is installed.
What time do classes run on Central Time?
We fit the timetable to your household. Weekend slots are the easiest to arrange on Central Time, and weekday slots are agreed individually. Everything is settled on the demo call before you pay for anything, so a family never finds out after the fact that the only available slot collides with something immovable.
What are the fees for an Illinois family?
USD 100 a month in a group of five to eight, or USD 150 a month one to one. Both are two classes a week, eight a month. There is no enrolment charge, nothing to buy, and no minimum term. The first class is free and is used to place the student properly rather than to sell.
Which ages do you take?
Six to sixty-seven. Placement comes from what a learner can show in the opening class rather than from their year group. Elementary students start in blocks, middle school moves into Python and real data, high school works toward AP Computer Science A and the mathematics behind it, and adults are taught at adult pace.
How large is a class?
Five to eight learners in a group, or one to one. The teacher is the same person every week in both cases. We do not rotate staff between sessions, because a teacher who already knows where a student got stuck last week begins the lesson somewhere useful instead of starting again.
How do we start?
Book the free opening class. It is a lesson, not a pitch: a teacher sets real work, watches how the student handles it, and recommends a level based on that. If the honest recommendation is to wait, or that another provider fits better, that is what you will be told.
A lesson, not a pitch
Tell us the grade and what the school has already covered. A teacher runs a genuine opening class, works out the real starting point, and recommends a level. If we are not right for your child, that is what you will hear on the call.
You can also use the contact page, or read about us first.