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NSF Makes It Rain: $722K Award To Evaluate Microsoft-Backed TEALS
theodp writes: Microsoft has $92 billion in cash parked offshore, so it's kind of surprising to see a $722K National Science Foundation award is going towards validating the efficacy of Microsoft TEALS, the pet program of CEO Satya Nadella that sends volunteer software engineers with no teaching experience into high schools to teach kids and their teachers computer science. Among its Program Changes for 2015, TEALS said it "explicitly commits to provide a core set of curriculum materials that are complete, organized, and adaptable," which should help improve the outcome of the Developing Computer Science Pedagogical Content Knowledge through On-the-Job
Learning NSF study schools are being asked to participate in. Meanwhile, CSTUY, a volunteer organization led by experienced CS teachers (including Slashdot user zamansky), finds itself turning to Kickstarter for $25K to fund Saturday Hacking Sessions. So, as Microsoft-backed Code.org — which has also attracted NSF award money to validate its CS program — is fond of saying: What's wrong with this picture?
(To be fair to TEALS: it may have Microsoft backing, but it's not strictly a Microsoft effort, and also started out as a pure volunteer effort, as founder Kevin Wang explained earlier this year.)
If Microsoft was paying, would you expect an unbiased study?
$700k sounds high, but what do I know.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
education in order to create the need more more H-1B visa holders.
that is documented independently.
I'm not sure that is a great idea. Some people are great at teaching, others are not. Someone with no teaching experience has a good probability of being on the "not" side. Even people WITH teaching experience are often poor teachers.
My concern with this is that you'll get someone with no experience that is also a poor teacher, and that person will turn the kids off to what could be an interesting field of study.
Love sees no species.
Funny thing is that I've been told that my graduates form the largest subset of all the NY area TEALS volunteers.
Meanwhile we continue to produce results but struggle to raise funds while the rich get richer.
To everyone reading this, please do check us out at cstuy.org, vet us, and draw your own conclusions.
Oh well, back to the grind.
Nice little tax dodge we give away to them, huh? Eh, whatever, I guess we're all okay with it. It's not like this would ever be an election issue or anything. Certainly not in this cycle
You can mod this offtopic if you want, but it was at the top of the summary, so I figure somebody is interested in the abyss where our money disappears
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
for a Federal government program with ramifications beyond a small number of citizens.
Sure, it could flop in the sense that the recommendation is not to proceed further. But, less than $1M of Fed. taxpayer money - that's chump change for a program undertaken in good faith.
Trump will make them pay a fair share once he's done with China and Mexico!
The slash article says, "a core set of curriculum materials that are complete, organized, and adaptable." As a middle school teacher I would love to get some material that meets those qualifications.
Because Computer Science is not a core subject, the teachers are left making up things as we go along. At this point I have a pretty good scheme of work that eaves the students leaving with a lot more than they came in with. However, it would be nice to have some real standards and expectations for each grade level. Meaningful material for hitting those goals would be even better; but at the present the teachers really don't have anything beyond what some department head thinks is important.
(BTW: for my classes, giving full authority to a department head, who doesn't even teach at my school or at my level, meant I got an edict of "No programming!"
Even Arduino boards got nixed. I can show them to the students; but they are not allowed to program, or play with, them. I was told, "Even you have said they are controllers. The students might learn how to control things, and we can't have that happening." I was left with ??? on my face.
Fear of "hacking," something that the administrators cannot even define, is hobbling us.)
So, provide the material, let teachers try to present it as a "standard" curriculum.
From the TEALS Volunteer FAQ: Is TEALS a Microsoft program? Yes, TEALS operates as a citizenship project within Microsoft. Microsoft is a huge supporter of computer science education, and provides most of the funding for TEALS.
Not to mention pushing Microsoft development tools and technologies.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yeah I am sure the NSF is more than happy to make Satan's Dream come true to import half a million techs from india who can't barely answer a phone or email and place them in your kids school with no teaching experience... that H1BEOTCH
They can't barely English too.
It's possible that nothing's wrong with the picture. Asking Microsoft to evaluate the efficacy of its program is like asking Big Pharma to evaluate the efficacy of their drugs.
It's a five year grant. In my field, that would be barely enough funding to hire one postdoctoral researcher and one graduate student to do the research. That's assuming no equipment or supplies are needed. Typically health insurance and overhead cost a lot.
Simon's Rock College
Not to mention pushing Microsoft development tools and technologies.
No, it is about teaching computer science and pretty much anybody in the industry can volunteer to be a part of it. But you saw "Microsoft" and immediately projected your own bias rather than actually doing any research or educating yourself about it didn't you. So from the TEALS site:
What’s the curriculum?
Our partner schools select from two TEALS courses: Intro CS (“Introduction to Computer Science Principles”) and AP CS A (“Introduction to Java Programming”).
Intro to CS uses Berkeley's Snap! visual programming language to teach CS fundamentals, not Microsoft tools.
Introduction to Java Programming? That doesn't sound very Microsoft does it. It's actually based on a text from Washington University.
Seriously it's all on the website, instead of being an ignorant naysayer spreading FUD you could actually contribute.
I doubt they bring in the cash on their persons. If this conspiracy theory were true, these people don't need the cash here in the US. Once you've got enough money in banks across the globe in a global bank (eg. HSBC) you can take out 'loans' against that money in other countries because your global 'net worth' is billions of dollars.
People like Mr. Trump and Mr. Gates have millions if not billions of dollars in debt which is neatly managed, repackaged and sold, yet they are 'worth' billions, not because they have the cash on hand but because they have 'investments' and 'holdings' and 'real estate'.
If someone tells you a rich/famous person's 'net worth' you can easily read "socialized debt".
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
There's much more than that in the teals website. Those are the "exciting" technologies students will learn about in their field trips:
- C# – build apps for 2.2 billion devices
- Microsoft Bing
- Microsoft Developer Evangelism
- Microsoft Cortana
- Surface
2014 site
Had a look at this. It's not cheap, is it? 116.13 USD from amazon.com (about 75 GBP). On amazon.co.uk it was 91.99 GBP.
Is this meant to be a book bought by individuals, or by schools?
The two volumes of Core Java, 10th Edition, will be cheaper together than this when they are published. (90.81 USD from amazon.com or 73.98 GBP from amazon.co.uk)
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
I'm not sure if this complaint is about Microsoft or the NSF, but it does show some ignorance about how NSF works. The NSF makes grants based upon proposals submitted in response to solicitations. So the starting point for NSF funding is writing a responsive proposal. These proposals are evaluated by outside reviewers who follow a set of clearly defined merit review criteria. There are lots of reasons that proposals for seemingly good ideas are not funded. In my experience, as a former program officer, one of the most common is that the proposal is not responsive to the solicitation. Although I was not directly involved in education related proposals, an important requirement of most of those proposals is an evaluation methodology that can effectively determine whether the project works. Education is also concerned with scalable and transferable ideas. So the likely explanation is that the people involved with TEALS provided a viable plan not just for delivering education, but also for evaluating its effectiveness.
Great clickbait headline. Slashdot needs to look up "make it rain". The TEALS effort is not getting a nickel from NSF. This is to find out- over 5 years- what works and does not work about this industry funded public education effort. Good on NSF!!!
One of the companies who actively complains that there is not enough local engineering talent (so that it can campaign for more H1-B visas, which introduces foreign competition into the market and thus LOWERS the salaries of American workers), is asking workers to VOLUNTEER THEIR TIME (read: not get paid) in order to accomplish almost the same thing?
That is what I learned from the website:
http://www.tealsk12.org/volunteers/FAQ/
That's $4.46 per hour. Also, the schools are supposed to pay the stipend, not Microsoft!
There's much more than that in the teals website.
Yes there are a lot of things, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook technologies outside of the core curriculum. But the core curriculum is very platform and vendor agnostic.