The programming curriculum within ISIS

Abstract

From 2014 to 2017, the Islamic State in Irak and Syria (ISIS), a terrorist political organization of Salafist jihadist ideology, had put in place an operational and relatively stable educational system. Among its Complementary Programs, ISIS included a curriculum for programming using the Scratch software. In this article, we discuss this curriculum by analyzing the content of the official ISIS programming textbook, with the objectives of characterizing: 1) the curriculum’s pedagogical intentions and definition of programming; 2) the programming curriculum; and 3) the religious and military indoctrination value. We found that, first, ISIS’s programming curriculum intentions are more about religious and military injunctions to build the caliphate than they are about developing 21st-century skills such as computational thinking. Second, although the progression of learning in the sequence of activities designed by ISIS seems logical and, overall, well-ordered, the ISIS programming curriculum does not encourage the development of 21st-century skills such as problem solving, discovery learning, or creativity—nor for that matter, the transfer of programming knowledge to different contexts. Finally, the textbook is particularly rich in elements of military and religious indoctrination and effectively participates in the indoctrination of students by helping to inculcate values consistent with ISIS’s jihadist ideology. This contribution seeks to better understand ISIS’s approach to education, which could provide support for initiatives aimed at rebuilding impacted education systems and groups.