Microsoft Spending $75M To Boost K-12 CS Education, Put TEALS In 4,000 Schools

theodp writes: An NSF-funded evaluation of the Microsoft TEALS program — which sends volunteer software engineers with no teaching experience into high schools to teach kids and their teachers computer science — isn't scheduled to be completed until 2018. But having declared a K-12 CS education emergency (which it's linked to an H-1B visa emergency), Microsoft is going full speed ahead and spending $75 million to boost computer science in schools. The software giant told USA today that it aims to put TEALS in 700 high schools in the next three years and in 4,000 over the next decade, focusing on urban and rural districts to reach more young women and minorities. "In the U.S. alone, the economy will create 1.4 million new computing jobs by the year 2022," wrote Microsoft President and Code.org Board member Brad Smith. "Yet, less than a quarter of U.S. high schools currently teach computer science. That's not enough and we're working with schools and policy-makers to change that."

Comments

What could possibly go wrong?

[arielCo]

volunteer software engineers with no teaching experience into high schools to teach kids and their teachers computer science

It's like they're trying to put kids off CS before they even have to choose.

Re:Really? I mean...

[dougg76]

We live near MS land and my son just finished a course where they sent a few programmers from MS to teach the course. While they did seem like capable programmers, they were not very good teachers. I think only 20% or so of the people who started the class finished. I tried to make my son drop the class because it was taking so much time from other classes that it was negatively impacting his grades. Interestingly enough, he did pass the AP exam, but I mark that more up to his participation in the First Robotics program and his actual enjoyment of making things. While he had a lot of fun coding, the overall experience left him with a bad taste in his mouth and he does not want to program anything again (did not want this). In some ways this makes me happy because he wants to go into mechanical engineering and I don't want him to get distracted by the software industries shinies.