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

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.

Comments

Just pay taxes

[JeffSh]

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.

Re:Just pay taxes

[110010001000]

And free shipping too!

Re:Just pay taxes

[bobbied]

Don't forget free video streaming!

Re:Just pay taxes

[lgw]

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:Just pay taxes

[sinij]

Speak for yourself. Tax money is mostly graft.

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

Re:Just pay taxes

[lgw]

"Republican traitor confuses tax money with bribery, supports Trump without a scintilla of awareness of the irony, news at 11"

What government program has received the most federal government money this century? Trick question: it's the Bush/Obama Bank Bailout. Single biggest destination for tax dollars was the Swiss bank accounts of bankers.

You know that gap in rewards for productivity? The lack of wage growth for the 99% this century despite productivity growth? The total sum of that gap for 18 years is roughly the amount of money given to bankers by the government. That's where the money went, if you were wondering.

Re:Just pay taxes

[DarkRookie2]

Nope just the shipping
They can have all the other crap that isn't worth the $40 a year they charge for it.

Re:Just pay taxes

[DarkRookie2]

No I am pretty sure it is because the top 1% of this country is hoarding all the money and paying for laws to keep it.

Re:Just pay taxes

[lgw]

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

Re:Just pay taxes

[lgw]

You might think so, but the math says they were given it directly by the government (on top of whatever they may be hoarding).

Re:Just pay taxes

[DarkRookie2]

It is because they keep buying law makers to make laws to give them more money.

Re:Just pay taxes

[infolation]

via your new, unwanted subscription to Prime, that you accidently 'signed up for' by not noticing their Prime dark UX.

Re:Just pay taxes

[lgw]

Indeed. That's "the Establishment" in a nutshell. And sadly the Establishment seems to have a stranglehold on government (far deeper and more complex than the portion related to corporations giving to politicians - that's just the tip of the iceberg). It's not obvious what to do about it, as it's not a Democrat vs Republican thing, it's an Establishment v Outsider thing, and the primaries are fairly locked down. Not entirely though: there may be some hope there still.

Re:Just pay taxes

[AHuxley]

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 good jobs reporting on computer science funding.
With the freedom to read, publish, invent, talk and comment online.
That freedom to select an quality education is what makes the USA great again.
Why the need to be seen funding "computer science"?
If its all about giving to "education", let the people in education select what is most needed and actually wanted.

A nation only needs so many great people in computer science every generation.
Thy can be found with normal IQ testing, on merit and with exams. Get given full scholarships and be productive for decades.

How about giving half just computer support. Give half to a lot more general education.
Give some funds for all other areas of education and see what the results are.
Do the average and low IQ students respond well to more ebooks? GUI robots? Computers?
A new lab? New buildings? More teachers? Really skilled teachers?
Look back a decade later and see what all that funding does to average students. A generation of super computer designers?
Another generation of average ebook readers and computer game buyers?
Can more IQ be taught and computer science create a smarter generation? Who can actually pass all their tests on merit?
Did more support for all education get better exam results years later?
Did more art, music, science, math, english for years change the results? Did much more support for only computer science get better exam results in all areas of education?

Will learning a CoC while learning to code make for better exam results and get more average students into college and the best university programs?

Re:Just pay taxes

[AHuxley]

More new money only approved for computer science does not add to new funding for areas outside computer science.

Re:Just pay taxes

[rtb61]

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 sure anyone smarter than them is fired and anyone stupider is blamer for everything. They are creating a toxic work environment, which will only get worse and worse.

Re:Just pay taxes

[lgw]

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.

Re:Drones teaching drones how to drone

[DarkRookie2]

That and this is prolly changing the Java that is taught with JS.

Re:Drones teaching drones how to drone

[The Original CDR]

Make America Great Again with more spreadsheet warriors! The spreadsheet collector will lead us!

Shops

[fluffernutter]

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

Re:Shops

[HornWumpus]

The world needs report column adjusters too.

Re:Shops

[sinij]

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.

Re:Shops

[Obfuscant]

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

FTFY.

Re:Shops

[Red_Forman]

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.

Re:Shops

[Obfuscant]

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".

Re:Shops

[quonset]

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 can't find people to fill positions.

If we're at full employment, that means positions were filled, yet somehow these companies still can't fill positions. It's as if they have a Bag of Positions.

Re:Shops

[HornWumpus]

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

Re:Shops

[Hognoxious]

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.

Re:Shops

[Bengie]

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 the extra 10% time to go over your design and figure out and deal with your edge cases before you paint yourself into a corner.

Adding more people to a project tends to make each person less productive. Taken to the extremes that I see, the number of programmers on a project can easily make a communications deadlock where no one is moving in the same direction but no one can stop working to the take the time to figure out what direction to go in. Everyone keeps busy doing meaningless work, but at least they get to keep their job. Get a proper architect and stop micromanaging, that's what I have to say about the phantom "programmer shortage".

Re:Pity this fucking moron IGW

[lgw]

When IGW makes shit up and presents no numbers to back it up

CNBC estimates the total size of the bank bailout at $29 trillion. That may be a bit high, but it's the right order of magnitude once you include all the money the Fed used to buy mad mortgage-backed securities. By comparison, total federal spending is just over $4 trillion, up 145% from 2000.

That's a damn good return on investment for the campaign contributions from the bankers.

you can safely disregard the apologist faggot for the hoarding of the 0.001%

On of us here is saying "no, the government isn't shoveling money to the 1%", and I'm pretty sure I'm not the one saying that.

Tower of auuuuuugh

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Journalists might want to acctually attend some of these clas&÷×[*$,squwaaasrk!!$&$&/;

Re:Pity this fucking moron IGW

[lgw]

Or, a better number: total tax revenue is just over $3 trillion, so the bank bailout by CNBC's numbers was "all taxes paid for 9 years" Even if that's 3x too high, that's still the where more tax dollars go than anywhere else.

Re:Drones teaching drones how to drone

[ShanghaiBill]

That and this is prolly changing the Java that is taught with JS.

The AP courses are standardized on Java. That decision was made by collegeboard.org, not Amazon.

Re:Pity this fucking moron IGW

[ShanghaiBill]

CNBC estimates the total size of the bank bailout at $29 trillion..

That absurd number says way more about CNBC's credibility than it does about the actual cost of the bailout.

Re:Drones teaching drones how to drone

[DarkRookie2]

OK. I wasn't all that clear
Hopefully they are not still using that dumb fish thing.

Re:Drones teaching drones how to drone

[HornWumpus]

If your planning on majoring in CS/EE/CompE in college, you better learn to program in high school. Or you'll be so far behind, you will never catch up.

Related: English majors should learn to spell before college. Music majors should already play instruments. Business majors should know how to fap. Pre Law should already be accomplished liars. Etc etc etc.

Re:Epic

[Bengie]

CS is not a fundamental critical skill, critical thinking is. Public education should be focused primarily on core fundamentals and touch just enough on other areas to give students a taste of different job roles in society.

Schools also need to be very careful about how enthusiastically they push, I mean, encourage specific jobs. Many schools tend to treat skills as rote memorization and a worse yet is the whole participation award attitude to make classes easy enough to not "scare" students away. CS is hard, 80% of people who attempt CS at college level royally faceplant, and 80% of those who make it are below average.

People good at CS tend to already get into CS.