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Education Technology

Amazon Accelerating Effort To Bring CS To More Than 133,000 US Schools 77

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
theodp writes: In addition to a monetary commitment of $10 million in cash and donations to Code.org, Amazon reports it's also accelerating the effort to bring computer science to all U.S. high schools by having employees spend time at Code.org, while maintaining employment at Amazon. According to the company's Day One blog, Amazon has lent its employees to help the tech-bankrolled nonprofit "gather data about computer science programs, or lack thereof, at every single school across the country." (There are over 133,000 schools in the United States.) Amazon added: "Putting this data on a map and combining it with what we know about the school's population, lets us see whether access to computer science courses are concentrated in wealthier schools or schools that are less diverse, and will help us bring access to the schools that need it most. [...] It will also ultimately support the much-needed pipeline for workers who are well versed in computer science."

Earlier, Code.org noted it was compiling the national database for use by the nonprofit and the CS community to "make our shared vision [for every school to teach computer science] a reality," but didn't note the involvement of Amazon, which committed $50 million last fall to the White House's new computer science push (part of a larger $300 million tech sector commitment). Execs from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Infosys occupy four of Code.org's nine board seats and have contributed $33+ million to the nonprofit (Facebook has kicked in another $10+ million). Hey, it's what parents want!
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Amazon Accelerating Effort To Bring CS To More Than 133,000 US Schools More

Amazon Accelerating Effort To Bring CS To More Than 133,000 US Schools

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  • You can lead a horse to water....

    • Horses make terrible programmers. They don't have the dexterity of digits that allow tthem to type fast.

      • But horses should be perfect operators of binary computers since they only have a total of two digits on their forelimbs. Humans with their ten digits are obviously relics of the bygone decimal computer era.
  • Can you even learn CompSci with just HTML/CSS/JS.
    You definitely can make web pages with them, but you really can't do much more.

  • the purpose (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @11:43AM (#57257238) Journal

    And the purpose is, as always, to flood the market and drive wages down.

    Got to have an insurance policy, in case something crazy happens like we stop importing so many from low wage countries.

  • Churning out code monkeys is not helping anyone...
  • I swear I thought Amazon was going to install Counter Strike on all schools. Think before using acronyms, people.
  • We have a catastrophic shortage of telephone sanitizers, I propose we make it mandatory class in all high schools.

    CS is a dead-end career (here goes my karma) in 2018 - too easy to outsource to India, too easy to automate or third-party OS all but most in-depth components. Sure, there always going to be shortage of good full-stack architects, like there will always be shortage of NBA superstars. However, going into basketball professionally is a horrible idea for 99.99% of people out there.
  • The word 'code' is a relic of the telegraph age and WWI encryption efforts and legal documents such as 'building codes'. It is appropriate in programming only in that it is cryptic and unintelligible to anyone other than the coder. It is a poor choice of words to encourage people to learn.

    I like 'algorithm'. It reflects the process better than 'code'. It conjures thoughts of creating a path to a desirable destination. Algorithm may be a new word to high schoolers, and not have the baggage of the word code.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      How's that etymologist gig paying?

  • CS or Coding? They're not really the same (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @01:02PM (#57257820)

    I'm of the opinion that we're in the middle of an inflating Second Dotcom Bubble. Having lived through the First one, I'm seeing similar patterns, one of which is, "We need more computer science students!" I think it would be beneficial for everyone to have a basic understanding of how computers work below the consumer level, especially now that things are so abstract and "Just Work(TM)" But, let's call it what it is...an attempt to push AWS adoption. Big hardware and software companies have done this for years...Sun practically gave away workstations and servers to universities in the hopes that people would buy them in their businesses later. Apple, same thing. And, Microsoft/Google are nearly giving away O365 and GSuite for the same reasons.

    I see a lot of comments saying they're trying to drive salaries down by flooding the market. While I'm sure that's true to some extent, offshoring and visa programs have already done this. I also see comments on topics like this that basically treat development as some sort of priesthood that outsiders can't join. Reality is that we're 400 levels abstracted away from real hardware in most cases these days. Especially with "code monkey" type projects like front-end JavaScript or CRUD applications, we're almost at the gluing-Lego-blocks-together level of simplicity. Go beyond that and it's exponentially harder, but these Dotcom Bubble startups and cloud providers don't need CS geniuses for the next round of expansion.

    The industry would be better served by teaching some of the basics to get the interested students hooked, publicly state that there are actually long-term opportunities in development and IT that aren't going to end up in India in 5 years, and make available entry-level positions that pay a reasonable starting salary. Students aren't dumb, and especially when they're paying huge sums for a degree, they're going to go with what they perceive as a safe career path. Current students who have IT and developer parents are probably seeing first-hand to some extent the effects of downward pressure on salaries, outsourcing and offshoring. I love my job in systems engineering and am good at it, but I work for a multinational company and know that I'm one MBA's spreadsheet and PowerPoint away from being kicked out when the CIO hires Infosys or similar.

  • ... combining it with what we know about the school's population ...

    ... they have all that information at hand.

  • Last I checked the skin color and gender of the coder doesn't make a difference to the computer nor how poor or wealthy the district is. Why not assist without regard to race/gender/sexual preference?

    White males are to Academia and the left right now what Jews were to the Nazi party when Hitler used them as a target for resentment to solidify power. I don't care who you are that should alarm you.

    • White males are to Academia and the left right now what Jews were to the Nazi party when Hitler used them as a target for resentment to solidify power. I don't care who you are that should alarm you.

      That would alarm me if it were true. Hitler blamed the Jews for secretly eroding society. But white males have been abusing their position of privilege right out in the open where everyone can see that it's actually true. That's fundamentally different.

      • "But white males have been abusing their position of privilege right out in the open where everyone can see that it's actually true."

        In the distant past sure but people who happen to share a skin color or other bogus characteristic on which imaginary concepts like race born today share those traits as an accident of birth and owe no debt for their actions just as those with other traits are owed no debts. Prejudices against those who happen to be white and male are now being encoded in corporate policies, e

        • No, white males are still benefiting today. I don't expect them to feel bad about being white (I may be clearly Hispanic but hey, I'm white too) but I do expect white males as a group to recognize that position and behave accordingly. In proper teamwork you give a leg up to the less capable members of your team so that they can be useful. I'm way beyond tired of hearing white males whine about programs that seem to favor anyone but them because of how unfair they think they are. That's not how it works; tho

          • "those groups are still behind today"

            Because someone is picking an arbitrary physical trait or set of traits which have no importance and pretending they connect people. Grouping people in this manner dehumanizes them. It wrongly ascribes to them blame or credit for actions of other individuals to which they have no significant connection. This is exactly how wars are justified, you group millions of men, women, and children as "them" or "the enemy" rather than realizing each is distinct, human, and withou

            • Grouping people in this manner dehumanizes them.

              No, grouping people in that manner and then treating them like objects and not humans dehumanizes them. Grouping people by probability of being abused and needing assistance and then helping them does the opposite. It treats them like humans when we know they are being treated like nonhumans.

              This is exactly how wars are justified, you group millions of men, women, and children as "them" or "the enemy"

              Yes, that is what racists are doing, very good. But it's not what people trying to help people targeted by racists are doing. The difference is that one group is attacking, and the other group is assisting, and it is su

              • "The difference is that one group is attacking, and the other group is assisting, and it is substantive."

                Just where is all this attacking? I'm looking around and I don't see it. There are no laws giving someone with white skin an advantage. It certainly isn't a wealth thing, the wealthy don't care about the poor and most white people are poor. There are a couple tiny groups of white supremacists but you aren't likely to actually encounter one in your lifetime. I see things like this story, which are attacki
      • "That would alarm me if it were true. Hitler blamed the Jews for secretly eroding society. But white males have been abusing their position of privilege right out in the open where everyone can see that it's actually true. That's fundamentally different."

        Okay, show me all the white males abusing their privilege amongst the poor children in rural midwest and among the white people who constitute most of the staff at walmarts, truck stops, and fast food restaurants across the nation. Remind me again why hirin
  • Just let them play https://codecombat.com/ [codecombat.com] If they do well and like it, they may be suited to program. The majority of the population simply cannot think like a programmer. In my anecdotal experience a simple loop confuses over half of the populous. Once you throw in algorithms, data structures and simple recursion you lose 80% of the rest and of what's left only about half have total grasp of the basic concepts; and that is totally fine. As my thermodynamics instructor used to say "Different people a
  • Making their actual cash cow (e-commerce site) function. Currently searches are finding results but won't display them, regardless of browser, OS or ISP and feedback submissions are failing..

  • Every school needs customer service.

  • Pushing CS in secondary education is all opportunity cost and little to no benefit. They're better off learning more about human languages, mathematics, sciences, arts, and humanities because they're much more useful for most post-secondary education options. Secondary school CS is useless for anything other than post-secondary education CS.

  • If you really want to make a difference in schools, the first, best way is to get more tech folks to switch careers to teaching STEM subjects!

    EnCorps (https://EnCorps.org) is a non-profit committed to precisely this mission. I've been involved with them for a year, and it's been one of the most transformative experiences of my life. So far I've put in over 400 volunteer hours tutoring students in STEM subjects.

    I've been an engineer for 30 years. My retirement looks OK, but I can't start taking it for at

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