Learn About The Technology Education And Literacy in Schools Program (Video #2)

Video Learn About The Technology Education And Literacy in Schools Program (Video #2) 11

Posted by Roblimo on Wednesday May 20, 2015 @04:49PM from the how-can-you-be-in-four-places-at-once-when-you're-not-anywhere-at-all? dept.

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Quoting our intro from yesterday's 'Part One' video: 'The Technology Education And Literacy in Schools program (TEALS to its friends), started with one volunteer, a Berkeley CS grad named Kevin Wang who taught high school for a while, then went to Microsoft for a much higher salary than he got from teaching. But before long, he was getting up early and teaching a first period computer science class at a Seattle-area high school that was (sort of) on his way to work.'

TEALS is now in 130 high schools and has 475 volunteers in multiple states but still has a long way to go (and needs to recruit many more volunteers) because, Kevin says, fewer than 1% of American high school students are exposed to computer science, even though "Computer science is now fundamental in these kids' lives." He doesn't expect everyone who takes a TEALS class to become a computer person any more than chemistry teachers expect all their students to become chemists. You might say that learning a little about how computers and networks work is like knowing how to change a car tire and cook a simple meal: skills that make life easier even for people who don't want to become mechanics or cooks.

(Bonus today: one transcript that covers both yesterday's and today's videos.)

Slashdot: So, Kevin why are there so few computer science teachers in U.S. high schools, and why do so few schools actually offer computer science at all?

Kevin: I think this is a big problem that I think everyone faces in the industry, not just in high schools. In the industry, I think if you look at the statistics, we graduate in comparison with very, very few computer science majors, we’re about a little bit over 1% of all undergraduates, and competing for that talent is incredibly intense, I think if you've ever gone to an undergraduate CS career fair, you see what that’s like. And it’s very difficult for high schools to be in the same league as corporate recruiting and corporate hiring, and as a CS major or even CS minor it’s – you have to make that decision in terms of financial rewards of what you want to do, and that impacts a lot of people very, very differently and that’s a personal choice a lot of them have to make and it’s a hard decision to make. If, on average, the student loans for undergrad is about $25,000 – not a year, $25,000 when they graduate.

Slashdot: So you started out of school as a teacher.

Kevin: Yeah.

Slashdot: And then you went to a far more lucrative career at Microsoft?

Kevin: Yeah, so when I started I taught at a local high school and taught computer science for three years, before going to graduate school in education and then going to Microsoft, working on what eventually became Office 365.

Slashdot: So, it seems like an interesting double career, if you are going to work in Microsoft every day how do you find the time to actually go and teach kids as well?

Kevin: Yeah, that’s always – you know when I chose to go into teaching it was – I always knew that industry was always going to be there, but when you’re a poor undergrad, moving into having any sort of job at all is great, and because of the difference in pay I know a lot of folks that have gone into industry straight away, and it’s hard to step it back, and then they don’t teach at all, they only talk to all their juniors and that’s – they sort of say that’s the one big regret sometimes that they have. But once I started at Microsoft as a software engineer for the predecessor to Office 365, because I was a high school teacher I was waking up at 6 am every morning just because – just force of habit, and I didn’t really have anything else to do in the mornings, from watching DVR daily shows or going to the gym, and a local school somehow heard that I used to be a high school computer science teacher, and they actually got in touch with me and said, hey, can you come and teach computer science here, and I said, yeah, I can do that for one period, you guys are sort of on my way to work, where I live here and the school is just a little bit north and I cross the bridge and then go to work at Microsoft, so I was able to work a deal out with them, I’d be there first period from 8 am to 9 am, and so I just make a little detour it by the time I get to work, I’m still the first person at work, and in terms of engineer hours, or engineering time and still relatively early about 9.30 or so.

Slashdot: So how do it go from just you doing that to now several hundred volunteers that have taken part?

Kevin: It kind of snowballed after that. One school, I was at that one school and even before the semester was over three or four more high schools actually heard about it, and asked me to do the same thing at their high school, and anyway I couldn’t do that, be at four places at the same time. So I recruited some friends at work and taught them how to teach computer science over lunch and a little bit over the summer, and that’s how we got started with four schools, four other schools and 10 volunteers. And that sort of snowballed after that, we ended up with the year after that was 13 schools and 35 volunteers, and then 70 schools with 100 volunteers – oh, I’m sorry, 70 schools with 200 some odd volunteers and then this year we have 130 high schools partnered with us to teach computer science with 475 volunteers from across the country, and from a lot of different companies and next year we’ll be at 170 high schools in 20 states.

Slashdot: Now, the fact that the volunteers are no longer all coming from one company, does that affect anything about it, how does that change the organization?

Kevin: Yeah, actually it makes it for the better, I think it’s great that we have such huge imprint or maybe that’s not the right word, but we are totally embraced by the tech community. Out of the 475 volunteers we have 78% non-Microsoft. As you can imagine, from Microsoft, we have lot of Microsoft volunteers in the Puget Soundarea, but across the country it’s people working for various different companies, and I think as engineers we don’t care who signs our pay checks when it come to something as important as computer science education in this country. It’s about fixing the problem together.

Slashdot: Now, I wanted to talk about the structure that TEALS uses, because there are a lot of educational opportunities for kids to learn programming a lot of ways that people can get involved, but TEALS is quite structured. Can you explain a little bit about what the methodology is?

Kevin: Sure, we – with my – yeah, coming from a high school teacher’s point of view as well as an engineering point of view, I think it's the one thing that makes TEALS unique in that way; it’s built by educators and engineers for educators and engineers -- for them to work together. And we are here to build a sustainable computer science program for partner high schools, so the volunteers – our software engineers and computer science volunteers they teach the kids, but the other goal, the half of the program is that the class room teacher that you are teaching with learns computer science along the way and after a year or two, they can teach on their own.

So, it’s not just that one first period class anymore, they can teach the rest five classes or six classes that they have, all computer science on their own. It’s all about scaling up computer science at those schools, up-scaling the existing classroom teachers that we have now and enabling them to be able to teach computer science. And if we do this as an after-school program or something else, 60% of our students do an after-school sport, we’d be missing out on a huge chunk of kids out, that otherwise, wouldn’t be able to take computer science. About 20% of our students are in band after school, marching band practices.

So, we want to make computer science gets accessible to everybody and every student at a high school regardless of what other extracurricular activities that they’re engaged in.

Slashdot: And part of this up-scaling that you’re doing, you are sending teams. I think you’re using four-person teams per school. How do they act? How does that happen?

Kevin: So, we have four volunteers that work with one classroom teacher. One, we wanted to make sure we have the teacher, TA to student ratio as most college labs. 75% of our time that we have with the students is labs. That’s where you can really learn computer science. And having a classroom teacher and a lab assistant, that reduces our staffing to about where college labs are – so, every student will get the attention that they need. And also, if you’re an engineer, you’re going to go to conferences, there are vacations, things that are shipping, you need other people to cover for you, so there is a lot of flexibility on that side so volunteers feel like they can still do their day-job very well and extra time they have left over goes to TEALS and teaching.

Slashdot: It shows it’s a big-time commitment.

Kevin: Yes, it is. This is, in order to work in schools and be a part of the curriculum, the kids all get grades for these. These are classes that are on their transcripts. Yeah, it’s a big, big problem and it takes a lot of time to run an actual class. I think all of us out here have been students and we only see one side of it, and I think everyone knows in theory and conceptually what it means to teach and to hear about teacher putting a lot of time. But once you actually volunteer, you actually feel that and a lot of our volunteers become advocates for education, not just computer science, but education and teachers in general. And that’s had a huge, huge effect, quite a few of our volunteers have either spouses or parents that taught, now they really, really understand what all of those hours go into hours at a classroom, there’s prep-time, there is grading, all of those things. And it makes teaching very real for them

But at the same time, they also work with an experienced classroom teacher that's there to help them along the way. They learn from the classroom teacher, how they teach and the classroom teacher learns from them the CS content. We provide the curriculum

Slashdot: Talk about the curriculum a little bit.

Kevin: Sure. We provide curriculum and training for our volunteers and our teachers. First of all, it doesn’t work if we just air-drop software engineers into these classrooms. This wouldn’t work – right? Our volunteers are trained over the summer. They spend about 40 hours or so over the summer to prepare them for teaching high school computer science.

Slashdot: Do they all have CS degrees?

Kevin: Our volunteers have either CS degrees, CS majors, or CS minors or are folks that learn on the job, so we have a very wide variety of volunteers and how they got to where they are in the industry now. We also have retired folks. They have been in industry for 20, 25 years now. Teaching is their second act. Wait, what was the original question?

Slashdot: I was asking about the curriculum. You came out of Berkeley, and so about some of your teaching material.

Kevin: Right. So, the curriculum that we train our volunteers over the summer, for about 40 hours that’s a part of the time that they spend working on this. But the curriculum that they use is for the introductory class so think of that as conceptual physics or first biology class, that is actually the University of California, Berkeley’s CS for non-majors course, it’s called Beauty and Joy of Computing. It’s a CS course for non-majors. You learn all of the big ideas in computer science, but you don’t have to worry about syntax. They’re all little block based programming languages. You learn things like OOB, recursion, making your own functions, but you don’t have to worry about all of this semicolons everywhere.

Slashdot: Now, in the big picture

Kevin: Oh, I totally forgot.

Slashdot: Go ahead.

Kevin: The AP curriculum. So, we also teach AP computer science. That’s the AP computer science, A, of course and we used the University of Washington’s curriculum for that – think of that as your first CS course for CS majors and it’s in Java and we use the University of Washington’s curriculum. So, all the parents, schools, kids, all of that – they are both great proven courses.

Slashdot: In the end, you’re not necessarily expecting everybody who takes this course to go become a computer scientist or programmer or maybe not even a technician. Talk about the overarching goals and why should kids have to learn this stuff.

Kevin: Computer science is now fundamental in these kids’ lives. We’re not just talking about, you know, people who teach physics, bio, chemistry, they don’t expect everyone to be physicist, everyone to be a biologist, everyone to be a chemist, same thing here. There is a certain amount of basic understanding for computer science that our students will need to have as they become citizens in this democracy and it’s incredibly important that they understand everything that’s underneath it. if you are going to be electing folks who are going to be legislating these things, it’s important to know how big data works, how AIworks if you’re going to be in a car that’s going to be self-driving in five, six years time and the governor is someone who is going to pass a law on how they are going to be regulated, it’s not magic, it’s computer science. And the people electing the leaders and the leaders themselves need to understand how all that works just like we know how gravity works and we need to do the same thing for computer science. And even if they don’t go into computer science, whatever field they end up in, having that computational thinking is going to be incredibly important and help them in whatever field they end up in whether it’s retail, education, service anything else.

Slashdot: One other thing you really put a lot of thought into making this a sustainable program rather than volunteers who are then going to fade away so the program disappears. You’re making it a cycle that the teachers get trained, but in the world of technology those things are going to keep changing. How do you keep these trained teachers abreast on what happens now, new programming paradigms, or whatever it is that happens, are they still involved?

Kevin: Yeah, so, classroom teachers or the schools partner with us for two years. Some teachers learn it in 1, others in 2 but somewhere around there. And after they have sort of “graduated” from TEALS meaning they can either teach intro or AP course on their own we don’t totally decamp. If they don’t feel like they need more help, then they are graduated there. But if they are concerned about what you exactly just said of new technologies coming on or if there is a change in curriculum or even just having just the fact of having industry volunteers in the classroom to be role models and keeping kids up in there oh here is what we are doing today, or something in the news came up, this is what its impact is. It’s huge. So a lot of the schools choose to retain one or two volunteers as lab TAs, as you can imagine, you’re still going to have class of 30 kids that all are going to have very different bugs that need to paralyze on, so having, so they go into this what we call the TEALS alumni mode and they continue to work with the schools of much lower sort of commitment level, you’re just showing up to labs and general help out as opposed to running the class, and doing all the grading and the prepping, all the stuff at the beginning like you are the beginning.

Slashdot: Is it a hard sell to find your volunteers?

Kevin: Yeah, because it is a big coimmitmentand I think a lot of folks think of, well yes and no right? I think if you are from outside looking in I think a lot of folks, it’s sort of like the bumblebee problem; if you look a bumble bee there is no way can it fly. And a lot of people looked at TEALS and saw the same thing. Hence, look, you’re asking way too much time, and the schools are not going to be, you know, you are asking way too much time from the volunteers, the schools are not going to do all these things in first period and commit to computer science. And as it turns out, the schools are willing to partner with us, even though it’s a very non-traditional way to provide teachers. Professional development and the technology sector and our software engineers have to be really really stepped up. I think, we get a lot, I think tech folks get I think perceived as folks who are not involved in community unlike you know, doctors do free clinics, lawyers do pro bono work, that’s all very well known

Kevin: So TEALS started with one school and then 4, and then 13, and then 35, and so at one point I found out that, look I’m going to be working with 35 high schools and it’s going to be probably 100 volunteers. And before that I was just doing it in my free time. So before work, lunch time and after work and essentially I had no free time. And once I found out, we’re going to go to 35 schools and need 100 volunteers and training them and all that stuff, I decided to run TEALS as a 501(c)(3) Nonprofit Organization, I sold my Porsche, I was going to live on that for a year or two. And see how that was going to go.

Slashdot: You would have quit your job completely?

Kevin: Oh, yeah. I was just going to run this as a nonprofit totally, and about a couple of weeks I was ready to hand in my resignation letter to my VP at the time Dave Thompson who ran exchange, took me to go see Satya Nadella who was back then the President of Server Tools and Business. And you know we talked about what TEALS is all about and us wanting to go just sort of go do this on our own, and he said look, if you run this as a nonprofit, you’re going to spend 80% of your time raising money. But the whole point of TEALS is working with the schools, working with the volunteers, getting computer science in the classroom. That’s what you need to focus on. So in order for you to focus on this what we’re going to do is we’re going to host you here inside of Microsoft, you don’t have to ask people for money, if you ask me for a budget. That’s why we have been able to grow TEALS at such a phenomenal rate and I haven’t had to ask anybody for money, which is great, and we get to concentrate on just growing computer science. And so I think the tech community has given so much to Microsoft and this is one of the real meaningful ways for Microsoft to give back to the tech community at large, and that’s why we teach Java free, computer science, probably this the only program at Microsoft that does that. And – but it’s all about growing that tech community that’s given so much to Microsoft. I think it’s a great way to give back and this is why I think all of our volunteers and engineers from different companies have embraced the program.

Slashdot: Microsoft... have they bought you back a Porsche?

Kevin: They haven’t yet. But right now I don’t even have time to think about that, and right now it’s next school year, volunteer finishing off signing up all the schools getting all of those things settled and we’re just ramping up our volunteer recruiting and interviewing and placement process. But I do have -- I've moved onto a couple of much older Alfa Romeos now...

Slashdot: More work?

Kevin: Hopefully not, but we will see.

Slashdot: If people want to get involved and don’t see TEALS in their own area, are you looking for more volunteers constantly?

Kevin: Yeah. There’s another thing that – about TEALS that’s very unique about TEALS is that we work with all sorts of different schools, schools in urban areas, in suburban areas, and in rural areas. Rural areas are some of the most underserved parts of the United States, and about 35%, 40% of schools in the U.S. are considered rural, or town schools and they’re usually a couple of hours from big metro areas. So we are able to teach these kids online and they get the same thing, they get taught exactly the same computer science classes as kids that are in a big metro area. And then we work with all sorts of schools, public schools, private schools, independent schools, charter schools, religious schools, we go where the kids are. That’s incredibly important to us.

Slashdot: Even in the technology hotspots, you had some pretty flabbergasting statistics about the numbers in California and Washington State. I was really shocked by that.

Kevin: Yeah. So nationally about 4 million AP tests were taken last year, in May of 2014 and only about 37,000 of those were for AP computer science, so less than 1%. And a lot of people think the States where there’s a big tech presence don't have that problem. No, they do. So for example, Washington State, same thing about 1% and about – out of the 750 high schools in Washington State about 55 or something like that teach AP computer science, in California same thing. I think they’re little bit below 1%, I think they are 0.8% or something like that that have AP computer science or AP computer science rate. So just because you are in a state that has a lot of technology, sometimes that exacerbates the big problem, because the tech companies are competing incredibly fiercely for that talent. And so sometimes it’s...

Slashdot: A big gap to jump.

Kevin: It is a big gap to jump, but we need to be where all of the other sciences are. For example, chem., bio physics statistics, they are all about 180,000, 150,000 exams, so we’re really, really far behind, where – and we need to make that up. And the only way to do that is for folks with CS degrees to really, really pitch in, I think that’s what we do best we will roll up our sleeves and get stuff done.

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