Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Help Teachers Incorporate AI Into CS Education

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Earlier this month, Amazon came under fire as the Los Angeles Times reported on a leaked confidential document that "reveals an extensive public relations strategy by Amazon to donate to community groups, school districts, institutions and charities" to advance the company's business objectives. "We will not fund organizations that have positioned themselves antagonistically toward our interests," explained Amazon officials of the decision to cut off donations to the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture after it ran an exhibit ("Burn Them All Down") that the artist called a commentary on how public officials were not listening to community concerns about the growing number of Amazon warehouses in Southern California's Inland Empire neighborhoods...

Interestingly on the same day the Los Angeles Times was sounding the alarm on Amazon philanthropy, the White House and National Science Foundation (NSF) held a White House-hosted event on K-12 AI education. There it was announced that the Amazon-backed nonprofit Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) will develop new K-12 computer science standards that incorporate AI into foundational computer science education with support from the NSF, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. CSTA separately announced it had received a $1.5 million donation from Amazon to "support efforts to update the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards to reflect the rapid advancements in technologies like artificial intelligence (AI)," adding that the CSTA standards — which CSTA credited Microsoft Philanthropies for helping to advance — "serve as a model for CS teaching and learning across grades K-12" in 42 states.

The announcements, the White House noted, came during Computer Science Education Week, the signature event of which is Amazon, Google, and Microsoft-backed Code.org's Hour of Code (which was AI-themed this year), for which Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — not teachers — provided the event's signature tutorials used by the nation's K-12 students. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are also advisors to Code.org's TeachAI initiative, which was launched in May "to provide thought leadership to guide governments and educational leaders in aligning education with the needs of an increasingly AI-driven world and connecting the discussion of teaching with AI to teaching about AI and computer science."

Foo

[PseudoThink]

I'm a high school CS teacher, so I clicked into the Slashdot headline link expecting something rather different in tone than what I found on this side.

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

Well, I learned that companies don't donate money to organizations that publically attack them.

That was a stunning revelation.

Ah.

[Black Parrot]

So we've advanced from "everyone should be a programmer" to "everyone should be an AI expert".

Re:

[gweihir]

Indeed. Even more stupid.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Of course, someone needs to be trained to do the 62.3% of future jobs that haven't been invented yet because reasons.

Welll

[christoban]

Well, this can't be good.

"Education"

[gweihir]

You keep using that word. I do not think you know what it means.

Opposite ends of a continuum

[VeryFluffyBunny]

A teacher's job, at its essence, is to get students to think deeply & rationally about particular things in particular ways in order to learn useful stuff. An advertising agency's job, at its essence is to minimise deep thinking & provoke emotional, irrational sentiments & responses from its audience in order to sell useless stuff to them. They're polar opposites. Why are they letting advertising agencies like Google influence what happens in schools? Don't we want children to learn useful stuff?

Re:

[gweihir]

Don't we want children to learn useful stuff?

Apparently not. At least that is the only explanation I can see. Obviously people that cannot think for themselves are easier targets for ads.

Re: Opposite ends of a continuum

[zkiwi34]

Because no one else (who isnâ(TM)t a for a profit beast like Google) wants to do anything at all about CS in grade school. States absolutely do not care. But it starts with the universities who see no place for CS in grade school.

to keep you hooked

[ZipNada]

"Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — not teachers — provided the event's signature tutorials used by the nation's K-12 students. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are also advisors to Code.org's TeachAI initiative"

A big part of the strategy of these companies is to get you using so many of their services for your computing infrastructure that it would be super hard, risky, and expensive to ever free yourself from them and move to another cloud service vendor. AWS (or Azure or whatever) will be what your workforce has expertise with. All your deployment and app management code would be exclusive to their massive ecosystem.

These tech giants are subsidizing education that teaches people how to use the AI being provided on their platform. They already provide the tutorials for the classroom. When you get done with the courses you will be very much inclined to associate AI with Amazon services (for example) which is where it will have been provided for you. Then you will get a job doing what they taught you to do, which is work with their tech.

Re:to keep you hooked

[RazorSharp]

It's an old strategy. In my day all the computers were Macs even though Apple was currently at its nadir. Apple sold computers to schools extremely cheap in hopes of raising a generation accustomed to their brand. Then Google and Microsoft decided they could out-cheap Apple (not too hard) so you rarely ever see Macs in schools anymore.

I've always felt that schools, both K-12 and post-secondary, should rely entirely on open source technology. Their job is to teach how things work, not train people how to use specific programs. You don't need to learn Microsoft Word, you need to learn the fundamentals of document creation and design. Because we have it backwards, everyone knows how to click on certain buttons in Word, but they don't really know when to use headings, how to use white space appropriately, etc. Education should be the most committed to open source because 1) openness promotes education and 2) vendor lock-in results in teaching to the program/network/system, not teaching the core underlying concepts (sort of like teaching history to the test and memorizing important dates rather than developing a holistic understanding of the past).

Teach CS well first.

[OneOfMany07]

You're talking about teaching a cutting edge area that costs TONS to even play around in (for real at least). Create value from the effort and time. Not from the whiz-bang area you can check off your list with.

Study

[richardwhite333]

I don't really like it. Soon there will be no need for teachers. I’m no longer looking for an essay title myself, but I found where they can compose a good title for an essay [papersowl.com] for me. This is definitely not beneficial. I don't know what will happen next.