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Education Businesses United States

Amazon To Fund CS Classes in Over 130 NYC High Schools (techcrunch.com) 67

Amazon announced today a plan to fund computer science classes in more than 130 New York City area high schools. Specifically, Amazon will fund both introductory and Advanced Placement (AP) classes across all five NYC boroughs, including more than 30 schools in Queens, near its new headquarters. From a report: The courses will be supported by the Amazon Future Engineer program, whose stated goal is to bring more than 10 million kids to computer science per year, and fund computer science courses for over 100,000 underprivileged kids in 2,000 low-income high schools in the U.S. It also awards 100 students per year with four-year $10,000 scholarships and offers internships at Amazon.

The funding for the New York area schools will cover preparatory lessons, tutorials and professional development for teachers, says Amazon, as well as offer sequenced and paced digital curriculum for students, and live online support for both teachers and students. All participating students will also receive a free membership to AWS Educate, which offers free computing power in the AWS Cloud for coding projects.

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Amazon To Fund CS Classes in Over 130 NYC High Schools

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  • Just pay taxes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JeffSh ( 71237 ) <jeffslashdotNO@SPAMm0m0.org> on Tuesday January 29, 2019 @04:02PM (#58042004)

    Amazon, we don't want you to run a non profit, we don't want you to involve yourself in our schools. we want you to pay taxes so that we the people can decide what to do with the tax revenue.

    • And free shipping too!
    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      Speak for yourself. Tax money is mostly graft. If Amazon accidentally helps someone with this obvious scheme to lower dev wages around their new HQ, more power to them. At least most of the money doesn't go to campaign contributors.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by sinij ( 911942 )

        Speak for yourself. Tax money is mostly graft.

        No it is not graft. Taxation is explicitly legal. Taxation is also necessary to maintain society.

        • by lgw ( 121541 )

          Campaign contributors give $x in response for about $10x back in tax dollars.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Amazon are a shite employer, this is basically the computer drone burn out program. Get as many recruits as early as possible, use them up and toss them out. The only worse employer would have to be US defence forces, talk about treated like a slave, do something wrong and get stripped naked and abused. Google is going real nasty, all lip service and back stabbing.

        They are preparing to continually hire, burn out and dump, employees, only the biggest arseholes survive in that environment, where they make su

        • by lgw ( 121541 )

          I've been amazed recently by stories of how bad it's gotten at Google. Just last week someone who has worked at both said that Google was worse than Amazon. Very strange.

          Amazon has really been trying to change their culture when it comes to engineers, but at least while I was there they failed to do so. The culture of using people up was just to ingrained. It's far worse in the warehouses of course - that's a dystopian nightmare, IMO.

          At least in the army everyone knows the deal.

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Tax money allows the school, parents and students to select what they want to do.
      English, art, history, math, chemistry, sport are also parts of education that might need some support all over the USA.
      Lift all sectors of education and many people can get into university. Study what they want and get accepted on merit.
      The USA ends up with more lawyers, scientists, engineers, artists, musicians, doctors, inventors, coal miners and carpenters.
      Some might even become great investigative journalists and get
  • Yes because I'm sure the kid that was going to be an "autobody specialist" otherwise will make a FABULOUS developer.
    • The world needs report column adjusters too.

      • by sinij ( 911942 )

        The world needs report column adjusters too.

        Not if a programmer tasked with coding auto adjust does his or her god damn job and fixes the auto adjust bug.

        • Don't go down that rabbit hole. She (production manager) wants the full product description even if you need to tape two sheets of printout together, He (alpha salescritter) insists the first 20 chars are more than enough.

    • Yes because I'm sure the kid that was going to be a "journalist" otherwise will make a FABULOUS developer.

      FTFY.

      • Insert whatever job you want in his quote, I think his point was that there is too many companies pushing kids into coding and not enough into other kinds of jobs.

        What's going to happen in a few years when there's 100 times as many programmers as there are jobs? Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are simply pushing kids into coding so that they may lower the pay checks of those future programmers. Don't like our ten dollars per hour rate? Fine, there's 99 other idiots next in line for that job.

        • I know what his point was. I was making a reference to the /. story about journalists getting their knickers in a knot because tweets are telling them to "learn to code".
        • What's going to happen in a few years when there's 100 times as many programmers as there are jobs?

          That will never happen. Unlike RAM or HD space, if you believe companies, there will never be enough programmers to fill positions.

          Remember back in the early 2010's (is that a word?) when companies were saying they couldn't find enough people to fill positions even though unemployment was twice what it is now? Guess what. We are at, essentially, full employment and the same companies are still bitching they

          • 'Full employment' means people are working. Not that all positions are filled.

          • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
            There is no lack of programmers, there's only a gross mismanagement of existing talent. Dilbert effect + bean counting + micromanagement absolutely destroys productivity when it comes these problem domains. Just look at the issue with architecture and design. Case study after case study shows it's 10x more expensive to fix a problem after it gets deployed in testing and 100x more expensive after deployed in production. Agile doesn't do crap against this and many implementations of Agile makes it worse. Take
  • Journalists might want to acctually attend some of these clas&÷×[*$,squwaaasrk!!$&$&/;

The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity. -- Edsger Dijkstra

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