Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Education

Amazon To Expand Its Childhood-To-Career CS Program To India Later This Year 43

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
theodp writes: According to an Amazon job listing for a contract position, the e-tailer is seeking a lead for a new Amazon Future Engineer program in India that's set to launch in 2021. "The initial research for Amazon Future Engineer in India," Amazon explains, "is currently underway and we look to the chosen candidate to dive deep into operationalizing the program to what is relevant for India and the student needs. The role involves working with local non-profits and government officials to deeply understand the needs of the students. They will utilize this research and feedback to build trust and implement a unique program addressing needs for different aged students, childhood to career. They will quickly diagnose any structural barriers with CS education policy/adoption by region, while also exercising a bias for action to get programs launched in 2021. This role will require strategic planning, ability to manage a budget and implement programs at a large scale."

In its press release celebrating record-breaking holiday sales in 2020, Amazon on Monday pointed out that its Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) program more than doubled its reach in the U.S. during the pandemic and is now serving more than 5,000 schools and 550,000 students in need with computer science coursework, largely by providing access to online courses from Edhesive.

Launched in 2018 with the goal of inspiring 10+ million kids each year to explore CS, Amazon explained that AFE is part of a $50 million commitment it made to CS and STEM education in 2017. Microsoft President Brad Smith later revealed in his 2019 book Tools and Weapons that the $50 million investments in CS+STEM education that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Salesforce each committed to in 2017 were part of a $300 million private sector pledge that Smith indicated was needed to get Ivanka Trump to persuade her father to fund K-12 CS; the President ultimately issued an Executive Order requiring the U.S. Dept. of Education to spend $1 billion on K-12 CS+STEM education.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Amazon To Expand Its Childhood-To-Career CS Program To India Later This Year More

Amazon To Expand Its Childhood-To-Career CS Program To India Later This Year

Comments Filter:

  • In the Before-Times (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Friday January 01, 2021 @08:00AM (#60884400)
    They called this lifetime indentured servitude [wikipedia.org]

    • Perhaps more like 10 year olds pressed and shanghai'd into the british navy? It wasn't a bad life entrirely compared to many others

      • He should get on to those medeival church ideas then:
        Can't make children without "marriage".
        Can't marry without being being approved by the church.
        Can't be approved without being "christened".
        Can't be "christened" without being an obedient "believer" serf.
        Ergo: Only their livestock is allowed to breed. Eveyone else must die.
        Aka: Literal eugentics.

        I bet Bezos wishes he could "get em" even before they are born.

    • I was about to make a similar point. It's interesting - in a bad way - to see corporations, and especially tech corporations, doing their level best to implement a world-wide caste system. How sickeningly appropriate that this story takes place in India.

  • As an educator in China, I am tempted. The world of Computer Science is a vast landscape. However lumping CS in with STEM is a misnomer. If you code for Facebook or Tiktok or virtually any other mainstream project, do you believe you should be considered STEM? It's bullshit. Coding is like the glue of the modern world. Caparenters never considered their work so influential. Yet this is the world we live in.

    The work if these companies is not altruistic. They do it out ofof a need. Teach Chinese, teach

    • Well I guess it depends on what your role is in those companies. You can't compare to a carpenter because the applications made by these companies are different, and that difference is defined by an engineer (who could be called "architect" or something like that). It may be that some (many) of the developers in these companies do nothing by code things specified in great detail, polishing the HTML/CSS etc. and they would be more comparable to carpenters. With regards to these "learn to code" and similar p
    • As so skilled I ADA I prefer assembly werking such long hours .maybe pimp daddy can provide me with

    • "Educstor from China".
      Come on!

  • for improved cradle-to-grave wage slavery.

  • And I get the chills, while reading the topic. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by burni2 ( 1643061 ) on Friday January 01, 2021 @08:04AM (#60884408)

    Just to be clear I also read the job description but the chills stayed with me.

    Am I just the only one, that questions this influence on children life and development, that sounds "a bit" like a back to the colonial roots approach, just to create future work force and trim people from the early childhood on, in a way that tries to turn many dystopian thoughts into reality.

    The Humanities really need to reclaim their place in the science community.

    Proposals:
    1.) Basic education needs to be universal and not career oriented.
    2.) Jeff Bezos and Amazon need to be stopped.
    3.) Bad SciFi should not become reality

    • Yep. Giant Big Data monopolies have become so large they run social services (for their own benefit of course). The only thing they lack is their own countries.

    • 1) Does not preclude teaching coding or CS as part of STEM. But, as part of making basic education universal, perhaps we should straight up ban corporations from directly getting involved in educating our children. It's fine if they sponsor the odd event or bit of kit, or contribute to course material, but they shouldn't be in charge of writing or teaching the entire course. And sponsoring a course kind of amounts to the same thing, eventually.
      2) Without a doubt.

      • ... as part of making basic education universal, perhaps we should straight up ban corporations from directly getting involved in educating our children.

        A thousand times this. Corporations want to indoctrinate students; partly so they'll have compliant future employees, but also because they want to discourage them from studying arts and humanities. The more technocratically-minded people the schools churn out, the fewer 'troublemakers' they'll have questioning and opposing corporate rule.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 )

      Am I just the only one, that questions this influence on children life and development, that sounds "a bit" like a back to the colonial roots approach, just to create future work force and trim people from the early childhood on, in a way that tries to turn many dystopian thoughts into reality.

      An Indian H1-B in the US once said to me:

      "In the days of my great-grandfather, the English business folks came to India to exploit the Indian workers there.

      Now we Indian workers voluntarily travel to the US to let American businesses exploit us!"

      Here in scenic Germany, my expert on Foreign Policy, the Indian owner of the local Kiosk, showed me the front page of a British tabloid, that he claimed indicated that they left the EU so they can create a new Empire of Colonies again.

      But he proudly stated that

      • I like to build rapport with my Indian coworkers by talking about how we in the US kicked the British out. Who needs a king?

    • They aren't controlling the entire curriculum. The CS oriented portion will only take up a small part of the class. Unlike in the US most parents in Asia *want* that.

      The argument against teaching any sort of basic computer skills could be made of teaching people reading and arithmetic .. there was a time those were "career oriented" too. Not everyone was going to grow up to be a scribe. And math was hardly needed except by scientists or architects/engineers. People got by *without* any kindergarten or educa

  • Sound like "Farm to Table" but for people?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Two words that should *never* be uttered together.

    Children do not know what is done to them is not normal.

    There have been children kept in a windowless basement room, naked, crawling on their knees, esmating from dog bowls, in a Romanian child home, some decades ago, and the kids didn't seem to think anything was weird about that, because it was all they knew.

    All it reminds me of, is my grandma's stories of her meeting Hitler Youth kids working for the Gestapo. She said they weren't humans anymore. They beh

  • Honest question. Put aside stereotypes (if possible). If it truly is Bezos' wish to flood the market with even more low-rent programmers, can't this be done in other countries?

    • Largest population = lowest cost. Amazon wants to completely crush the cost of labour. What they will achieve instead is the complete destruction of Western economies. There is no need for Western services in Asia/the East. No accountants/doctors or lawyers. No baristas either. No steel/metal leaves India without being refined into bars first. So no need of Western refineries either. Now that most manufacturing is in China and much is starting to move to India. There's no need of Western manufacturing eit

    • Honest question. Put aside stereotypes (if possible). If it truly is Bezos' wish to flood the market with even more low-rent programmers, can't this be done in other countries?

      Perhaps it's easier in India because of the caste system. I imagine it predisposes people toward accepting preordained roles. Except in this case they're preordained by Amazon rather than by lineage.

  • I'l bet there will be an overwhelming number of applicants for this. Parents will choose this for their kids. It's their right, and a good choice. CS education early is a very good idea. In the future, as today, programming and mathematics will allow you to build the future. Otherwise you can be an entertainer or someone who uses or builds things designed by others. If you can't even do basic coding you'll be like a grandma who has to call someone to change a lightbulb. Everyone knows the future is going to

Slashdot Top Deals

All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin

Close