CS Course Growth Rates in Washington 2019-2024

The dashboards on Washington Computer Science Courses 2019-24 illustrate what types of computer science courses were taught in Washington’s public schools from 2019-24. Drilldowns are available statewide, by ESD, and by district. 

While the dashboard contains a tab that shows how the numbers in various courses have grown from 2019-20 to 2023-24, educational leaders may find the additional course-centric perspective in this blog post valuable when trying to determine how to modify their CS course offerings for their educational organization.

Key Takeaways

• In 2023-24, the three top CS course categories (Core CS – 45%, Robotics – 23%, Media Programming – 12%) consisted 80% of all CS course sections. In a year where the total number of CS course sections decreased by 2.9%, the number of media programming sections went up by 4.4%.
• In the years covered by the OSPI report (SY 2019-20 to SY 2023-24), the number of Robotics sections increased by an average of only 0.9% annually. In contrast, Core CS had a 4 year annual growth rate of 6.6% and Media Programming 8.4%.
• While the top three CS course categories (Core CS, Robotics, and Media Programming) were the same between High School and Middle School, Robotics was much more prevalent in Middle School (36.6%) than in High School (13.8%)
• Cybersecurity and Data Science are two branches of computer science of growing importance. Cybersecurity has a 4-year annual growth rate of 36.0%, and AP Cybersecurity is scheduled to launch in 2026-27. In contrast, there were only 0.5 sections of Data Science statewide.
• After 21009 Robotics (452.3) and 10152 Computer Programming (311.2), 10157 AP Computer Science A (175.9) had the third largest number of sections of any course statewide

Course Category Growth Rates 2019-24

Overall

High School

Middle School

Course Growth Rates 2019-24

Overall Top 12 Courses

High School Top 12 Courses

Middle School Top 12 Courses

Notes

• For a full list of what courses are in what course categories, go to the “Course Code to Category Mapping” tab on the visualization on Washington Computer Science Courses 2019-24. If you have any recommendations to improve this mapping, please contact washington@csteachers.org.
• “Overall” provides data on all schools with at least one grade between 6th and 12th grade. This is the standard used by the  2023-24 K–12 Computer Science Education Data Summary Report published by OSPI in June 2025,
• “HIgh School” refers to schools with two grades between 9-12 at least one which is 11th or 12th grade.
• “MIddle schools” refers to schools with two grades between 6 – 8 at least one which is 7th or 8th grade.
• Data on “High Schools” above include course data from schools that are both “High Schools” and “Middle Schools” (e.g., a 7 – 12 school). All course data from schools that were both “High School” and “Middle School” were included, regardless of which courses were taught to which grades. Similarly, data on “Middle School” include course data from schools that are both “High Schools” and “Middle Schools” (e.g., a 7-12 school). This explains “AP” courses showing in the middle school data.
• The “Overall” data also includes course data for schools that are neither “high school” or “middle school.”
• The sum of “high school” and “middle school” data does not equal “overall” data