It’ll take a while for the internet to become a mainstream educational resource in Myanmar. Already, though, millions of children and young adults are active online, and throughout the country the number is increasing daily. As I’ve argued before, it’s thus high time for reformers in government departments, UN agencies and INGOs to embrace the digital revolution and harness its enormous potential for teaching and learning.

One important way to do that is by making basic computer science central to the curriculum from kindergarten all the way up to university. A sentence that leapt off the page of the New York Times at me a few weeks ago was this: “At Stanford, about 90 percent of undergraduates take at least one computer programming class, compared with about half at Harvard.” Those are stunningly high figures, and they point the way to what is sure to become standard practice in higher education no more than a few years from now.

Where, then, to look? Well, for starters to Code.org. Launched in January 2013, this US non-profit believes that “every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer programming”, and that “computer science should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra”. Its list of corporate and billionaire donors is a Silicon Valley dream team, and its educational partners are at the cutting edge of online learning. Beyond that, the statistics are truly impressive. In less than 18 months, nearly 40 million people have accessed Code.org’s free “hour of code” computer science course, and nearly 2 billion lines of code have been written by students. A brief launch video, featuring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and many others, is a huge YouTube hit with nearly 12 million views.

Even in a context of spectacular success, there are still issues that need to be tackled. In particular there is in the US a marked gender disparity, with boys much more likely to get into coding than girls. Slowly this is being addressed, though, through organizations such as Girls Who Code. Disparities across other demographic groups have spawned similar initiatives, and at least in America there is reason to believe that the not too distant future will see coding taught as a fundamental life skill alongside the traditional 3Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic.

Faced with all this, the policy advice for educational planners and funders in Myanmar is surely straightforward – link with Code.org, build local language platforms, and allow spreading internet usage to work its magic there as it is doing elsewhere.