According to other sources, it seems like what will be taught is HTML: http://www.bafweb.com/2014/07/13/lapprentissage-du-langage-h...

The posted article also points out that the classes will be "périscolaire", i.e. outside of regular class hours. This means that the teachers who teach those courses will have to stay late. Only the super-committed teachers will volunteer to do that - and it's not a given that there will be such a teacher in every school. And even when there is, remember that the French school day typically finishes at 4.30p. The teacher will have to attempt teaching a group of exhausted pre-teens who just want to go home.

Additionally, again as mentioned in the article, almost a third of schools (16 000 out of 54 000) in France don't have access to high speed internet - and many, many students from the lower social groups may not have internet/computers at home. The government says that in September, half of these 16k schools will magically get high speed internet access through radio links. If history teaches us anything, those 9k schools certainly won't all get working internet overnight. I wouldn't be surprised if most schools still won't really have a functional internet by September 2015. And internet is not everything either- those schools (mostly rural and/or underfunded districts) are also very likely to have just a few, outdated computers for the whole school, without a budget to address that.

As someone with a graduate degree in computer science, extensive experience teaching CS/programming to kids/teenagers/adults, and an avid follower of work done by Piaget, Papert, Abelson, etc., I'm absolutely all for exposing children to computational ideas early, and using them to support and enhance learning. I've taught many such classes with kids 6-12 myself, and it can be done very successfully- even with kids who are not that interested in the first place.

Unfortunately here, it seems like it's a reactionary measure taken by our government to not be behind similar initiatives in the US and other countries, without much thought given into it. The fact that it is called "apprentissage du code informatique" rather than "apprentissage de la programmation" (or even "apprentissage de l'informatique") is not ideal either; the first thing that I associate it to is "apprentissage du code de la route" (classes that teach the laws behind driving, which you have to take before your driver's license in France), an association that I am sure many non-tech savvy parents or teachers will make in some way. With the taste French government has for putting certifications and "brevets" on everything, this is going to get silly quite fast (I remember the B2i I had to take in middle school, a "certificate" for internet & computers that we obtained after being taught what was essentially an internet explorer class by a shop teacher who was way out of his depth).

Interestingly enough, on the other side of the spectrum, the Ministre de l'Éducation is merging effective, proven 2-year university diplomas that produce high quality computer technicians (who can then easily take on a computer engineering/computer science degree) with tangentially related electronic engineering ones, just to save money: http://linuxfr.org/news/au-secours-du-bts-iris-informatique-....

Things like the latter will definitely hurt France's ability to compete on the international tech scene. On the other hand, I'm not sure teaching HTML after class hours in schools were teachers are already overworked and lacking critical resources will do much.