A Great Job At CSNYC
As many of you know, CSNYC is a non-profit I helped start a few years ago along with some colleagues. We are attempting to bring computer science education to the 1.1 million children in the NYC Public School system.
The organization is still quite small but has been growing slowly and steadily since we formed it. There are five or six people working at CSNYC depending on if you count people working on it part time.
We are doing a lot with a small crew and this year there will be over 100 public schools in NYC (high school, middle school, and even a few elementary schools) with CSNYC funded classes in them. We do this by partnering with the very best computer science programs around the country and funding them to come to NYC and train teachers and get their curriculum into classrooms.
We also do a bunch of other things and possibly the most impactful of all the things we do is community development. We run meetups and other events to bring NYC public school teachers (and other teachers too) together to talk about how they are using computer science and programming in their classrooms.
Our largest meetup, the CSNYC Education Meetup, has almost 600 teachers in it and has quadrupled in size in the past year. My great hope is it will quadruple in size again this year. Each monthly meetup has a theme, such as Careers in Computing, CS Across Disciplines, Showcase of teacher resources and student work, etc. There is a meetup today actually. It is a meetup today about Teaching the Next Generation of Tech, a symposium led by panelists from ScriptEd, TEALS, AFSE and Flatiron School. Anyone who is interested in learning more about CSNYC, the programs we fund, our teacher meeetups, or teaching computer science to K-12 students is welcome to attend.
So that is a long lead-in to this job opportunity. We have opened another job at CSNYC and this role will be dedicated to running and coordinating all of our meetups, our events, and our communications efforts, including our website and social media efforts. The job posting is here.
This is a great opportunity for the right person. You will get to meet and work with hundreds of teachers who are embracing computer science and bringing it into their schools and classrooms. The right person will enjoy meeting new people, and will be organized, web savvy, and passionate about the CSNYC mission. If you are all of that, and more, please send an email to [email protected].
And if you know someone who would be great at this job, please send an email to [email protected].
This is an important effort that is doing great work and I’m proud to have been part of making it happen. If you would like to support it financially, you can do so here.
Comments (Archived):
Great work.Seems like the most vital product of your efforts is the community you foster. As it should be.Terrific job and an opportunity to be an organizing part of this community. Huge opportunity for the right person.
No doubt this will turn out to be your greatest investment ever (and cover that legacy part, too! 😉 )
I think it might already be. We are touching >15,000 students this year. On a dollars invested / impact it is really good
That’s fantastic. Super proud of you and the team and the kids. As always if you need any help you know where to find me. Super cause.
Me to on that offer.
I didn’t realize how spread the outreach and impact of CSNYC were, outside of New York. Congratulations.
So cool. This is really filling a need.
One day, this will be standard teaching in every high school. This is a pioneering type of initiative.
The pioneering part will be teaching kids to code without enough qualified teachers to teach them. Opens up room for innovation in K-12 heavily regulated classroom.
I don’t agree with that.It’s possible to learn to program (what it used to be called at some point I personally hate when it’s called “coding”) without teachers if someone has motivation and curiousity.Especially now with all the resources on the web. [1]Programming is digital and interactive with no worries about “breaking something” or getting hurt. And all the tools are cheap. Not like back when I “learned” to “program”. (I’m definitely not a programmer but I’ve made money from things that I’ve written and was completely 100% self taught).It’s not an analog subject where you need Henry Kissinger sitting in front of you so you can ask a question and get an answer. Besides this type of thing already exists on the web anyway. The entire notion of a classroom is outdated for many subjects.Besides the community around programming is tremendous. There is free help and advice (interactive if you need it) everywhere.Suffice to say without even doing a web search that there are tons of people who have made money writing programs that never learned it in the classroom. Because it didn’t exist they had to learn on their own.[1] Not like learning Karate, how to sail, how to play a music instrument etc.
Terrific initiative and it connects with this news story today on Code.org’s drive to get millions of kids into coding:* http://techcrunch.com/2014/…Articles says that Hour of Code has reached 40 million students in over 200 countries over the course of the year.In SF, I hacked together something for the SF Public Office of Finance and its K2C program for encouraging parents to save consistently towards their kids’ education from age 6 to college.I included a scoping piece for a Finance Portal that the kids would code themselves (apps etc) once they’re in K12.At the moment, the portal is run by Citibank and it’s ugly (https://mysavingsaccount.co… so I think the kids in high school would do a better job. Plus they could earn $ pocket money as part of that code development work.SF Public Office of Finance and Citibank would reward them!
Great to see it growing!
getting happiness as ROI is a different investment altogether … this one makes us realize “we do cry in happiness”…My hearty wishes for you to get the best ROI on this one.
we teach kids math, science and english. Helps them think, reason, communicate. Need to teach/expose them to code because it does the same.
All the best with finishing the position, Fred!
In related news, this on page 1 of the NYTimes…Web-Era Trade Schools, Feeding a Need for Codehttp://www.nytimes.com/2014…
What’s impressive here is “the hustle” surrounding making CSNYC a success:”We are doing””We do this by partnering with “”funding them to come to NYC””We also do a bunch of other things””We run meetups and other events “It’s that hustle that separates people who sit on the sidelines just saying shit and people who actually make it happen.
Oh, I knew you were a Hustler fan.
Beaver.
Dam
Such wow 🙂
.This is a real contribution to the advancement of mankind — not as substantial as the chicken fried steak, mind you — of which you should be very proud.You have leveraged your personal brand (God that sounds weird) into leaving some real fingerprints on education.Well played.JLM.
Chicken Fried Steak was my first meal after landing in Fort Worth to start my first job out of college. To this day, I have no idea what I was eating.
.And it was damn good, wasn’t it?Chicken fried steak is better in Forth Worth where the west really begins.JLM.
Could not be said better from somebody born and raised there. When they used to put the city and state of birth on the Passport, I would always get a smile when entering a foreign country and coming back home. Best quote from a customs person in Narita: Where are your boots and hat?? and one in PHL: Well I guess you have a right to be a Cowboy’s fan.
And can we now talk about biscuits and gravy?
Fred,Did only a little bit of research, so I apologize if you / CSNYC has talked about this elsewhere.. but are there plans to try to take this to others cities?If so would be very interested in helping to figure something out where my roots are (Cleveland and Columbus Ohio)? Surely a long process.. would love to help get it started.Also any thoughts of using it as a platform to add any other essential skills not really taught in main stream right now (particularly financial skills and analysis comes to mind as that is my passion and an area that we all will benefit from enhanced skills in)Let me know!Matt
our hope is we inspire people to copy us. there are 1.1mm kids in public schools in NYC. my focus is getting CS in front of them. we are 15,000 kids so far, a couple years into this. we’ve got a lot on our hands in NYC and we are focused entirely on NYC as a result.
Ok perfect. Makes sense and I love the openness. If / when I get enough people aligned to get this stuff in route in these areas will let you know 🙂
it’s a word – you wrote it, i read it, i understood it. that’s language. more please.
Whachutalkinbout Willis?http://www.merriam-webster….
would love it hereThe density of NYC (in addition to the type of people that live there) [1] means that there are many opportunities that either can’t exist or are near impossible to pull off in a smaller venue. Not enough of the “right” type, and quality, of human capital.[1] NYC is a place that people travel to from somewhere else (in addition to the indigenous of course.) What that means is that you get people who are motivated enough to actually leave their family and their comfort zone to seek out some dream. Nobody wakes up in the morning, living in Kansas, and says “hey I want to move to Lancaster, or Philly or Baltimore”. In those places you have an overwhelming number of people who grew up there or perhaps a small amount who ended up there by chance. Even Philly, with Penn and many colleges, ends up having most of those graduates leave after school for, as an example, NYC (like Fred did..)
Yeah. I read it on the Internet, so I know it’s true.
i read it on disqus, so it has to be true.
word
Fair’nuf
.If you want to be in the live music biz, you move to Austin By God Texas.Back when I moved here — to build great buildings as I can’t even hum well — you could go to the Broken Spoke and Willie, Jerry Jeff and Kris Kristofferson (former Army Ranger BTW) would be sitting in for the price of a beer.The talent here is unbelievable. The last two weekends were ACL music festival — an explosion of live music in a huge outdoor park.JLM.
If you want to be in the live music business, Lancaster is a great place to startThat kind of falls under the rubric of “hey ABC has a better fashion program than Harvard does!!!”. But we weren’t talking about the fact that there isn’t a reason to live in a particular place for a specific reason your comment was in response to computer education not music (which I’m almost as clueless about as sports).I mean Fred can reach out on this blog and there are enough people floating around NYC (could be working in the financial district for example) that a few will raise their hands. You can make the same request in Lancaster (or even Philly) and “N” is simply so small that it would have a hard time matching what can happen in NYC. (Which you acknowledge of course..)Bruce (funny at first I didn’t even know who you meant he’s normally referred to as “Springsteen” in these parts or “the boss”) got his ass out of Asbury Park or whatever shitty North Jersey town he grew up in.there are people who aspire to live in Lancaster and move here for itCharlie, with all due respect, how many people “aspire to live in Lancaster” or Philly for that matter?By the way the thing I associated Lancaster with was printing apparently that industry is or was big in Lancaster.
I’ve decided that you need to write a column for the local Austin paper kind of like a civic booster type thing. Highlighting the best of Austin (as opposed to “if it bleeds it leads” news).Then you try and get it syndicated. And on the web. (That’s easy..) Every now and then you try to get a piece into “opinion” in the NYT.Above, and similar things you’ve said, which from time to time get under Fred’s skin, are really world class in a Donald Trump kind of way.You could call the column “Well Played”.
Ha.
that’s great Willy. i would love to see collaboration happen.
Or having a reasonable family life while engineering solutions for heat resistance (Thermacore), where work is ten minutes away.Agree on that one. My office is literally 3 minutes from my house. Maybe 6 minutes during rush hour. I could walk I guess. I can’t even tell you how great it is to not have to drive into the city.In my first thing out of college I had to drive I95 S. to CC Philly. That was like 50 minutes during rush hour two times per day. Bumper to bumper. Hated it. Couldn’t wait to not have to do that.The next thing I did I was maybe 10 minutes both ways.The next thing I did was maybe 17 minutes both ways.Now I’m at 3 or 4 minutes. The engine doesn’t even warm up. The short time is an improvement even over the short 17 minutes. I almost bough an office that was 10 minutes away and boy I’m glad I went for the closer one. (That one was across from a Whole Foods though). I love being close to work. Nice area as well.What attracts you to Jersey?Nothing actually. My wife actually. Paying much higher taxes than when I lived in PA (for most of my life). Income tax and real estate taxes are way higher in NJ.But my new wife lived here so I bought a house, moved the office, so her kids didn’t have to leave their school. Also she had just started a new job (not that she couldn’t have gotten one easily in PA).The reason I want to live there again is because it’s full of people who hustle because they thrive on that and they’d crumble without it. Aspirational, intelligent, thoughtful, ambitious people.Yeah exactly. It’s boring where I am. And people are not what I call “high capacity circuits” by any means.
Yup exactly.There is another store down further on 73 that is a whole foodsclone Rastellis family market which just opened. Probably a place you could get your bread into. Family owned.http://www.rastellimarket.c…