At a middle school in the South Bronx, the curriculum is reading, writing, arithmetic - and software engineering. It's part of a new Department of Education program to better prepare students for the jobs of the 21st century. NY1's Lindsey Christ filed the following report.

In a South Bronx classroom, 11-year-olds are writing code. 

"It helps you create things with technology," says student Denise Suastegui. "You become an inventor! It's amazing!" 

Software engineering is a core class at M.S. 223, starting in sixth grade and expanding through high school, a rarity in a city and state that do not require students to study computer science. It's one of 18 schools in the city's software engineering pilot program.

"This class combines a lot of strengths that students may have," says teacher Ben Samuels-Kalow. "So it's artistic, it's design, it is math, it is science, it is also social studies." 

The goal is start early giving these kids the tools they to compete for well-paying jobs in a high-tech world. It's the kind of instruction that's often not available in low-income schools, where most of the students are black or Hispanic.

"I want to have my kids go into a world where they are accepted based on their skills and not based on what they look like and not judged on what they look like, and that involves me having frank discussions with 11- and 12-year-olds about the fact that people aren't going to assume that you know what you're talking about with computers because they're used to computer programmers looking like me," Kalow says. 

Those frank discussions mean students are remarkably well-informed about the big-picture issues about technology, race, gender, income and education. 

"I saw the statistics of boys being more in there [than] girls, but I don't care how many boys are in there. I will just go on in there, even if I'm the only girl in there, I'll be thinking, 'I'm a girl. I can go into coding,'" Suastegui says. 

"I like that we're able to work with the computers, because at home, a lot of families in the South Bronx, a lot of them don't have Internet access, so when we're in school, we're allowed to use the computers and a lot of electronics when we're in software engineering," says student Celine Bueno.

Ramon Gonzalez, the principal at M.S. 223, says it's important that every student is required to learn coding.  

"There can be no exception," he says. "And whether it's a girl, boy, a student with special needs, a talented-and-gifted." 

Potential future software engineers, every one.