The Fifth Annual NYC Computer Science Fair

Once a year, tech companies in NYC run a fair for high school computer science students in NYC.

This was last year:

Tech companies set up booths and the students come by the booths learning about what it is like to work in a tech company. Colleges and Universities that offer undergraduate computer science majors also set up booths to recruit these students to attend their schools and major in computer science. And extra-curricular programs that offer computer science education after school, weekends, or over the summer also come and set up booths to solicit interest in their programs.

It is the one time each year when all the stakeholders in the NYC K12 computer science movement come together and it is a fantastic day. I have attended every year and I plan to attend again this year, in our fifth year.

This event is called the NYC CS Fair and it is happening on Wednesday, April 11, 2018, from 9:30am-2pm, at the Armory Track, 216 Fort Washington Ave, New York, NY.

If your company wants to help build a pipeline for a more inclusive and diverse talent pool, you should come and host a booth at the fair.

If you want to do that, please reach out to Bryan at Tech:NYC, [email protected], or Aimee Rosato at TEALS,[email protected].

#hacking education

Comments (Archived):

  1. JimHirshfield

    Will you have a table there? I’d like to see the USV investment thesis outlined on a tri-fold poster board.

    1. fredwilson

      no. we want to highlight people/companies that do real work.

      1. JimHirshfield

        LOL, you’re funny today!!

        1. Lawrence Brass

          And you were there Vasudev.Proof of your 10+ year membership of this fine place.So, do we do any real work?… 🙂

          1. Vasudev Ram

            Mu :)https://jugad2.blogspot.in/…

  2. LE

    I hope these kids realize how lucky they are to be living in a place where an event like this can even happen. Most places in the country don’t have anywhere near the amount of tech opportunity and density needed in order to make a fair like this even viable. Critical mass. And most places don’t even have the motivated talent or access to corporate sponsors to float this. Geez I hope they realize how lucky they are to be living in NYC.

    1. sigmaalgebra

      > Critical mass.Maybe, but that’s not so clear:(1) Internet. Now the one, best, nearly both necessary and sufficient, way to make progress in learning about computing is in just one word, Internet. So, get a computer and Internet access and start browsing, reading, learning. The Internet is just awash in nearly everything about computing from first introductions to as deep as it gets so far.(2) Study. Learning about computing, as well as pure/applied math, most of engineering, etc. requires study, and that is mostly a nearly solitary activity and not a spectator sport or much of a social activity. The video made the fair look like mostly a social activity.(3) PR. From what I saw in that video, it looked like nearly all the sponsors were engaging in public relations without anything very directly helpful to students trying to learn and have careers.For NYC and “critical mass”, it seems to me that nearly any interested student in the more developed countries with an okay computer and okay Internet access has about all they need to make whatever progress they can, have plenty of “critical mass”, far from NYC, to learn about computing.(4) Math. Sure, for computing, need to know about using a standard operating system, text editor, Web browser, about programming languages with their syntax and semantics, compiling, execution, about basic algorithms and data structures, TCP/IP, etc. But that stuff is now way too simple to be much of a foundation for a career. In a car analogy, it’s now about like knowing how to drive a car, and that might be a prerequisites for being a taxi cab driver. Bluntly, for high school and undergraduate college students now, it would be much better for their career interests to concentrate on pure/applied math than anything much more directly connected with computing. Why? Because the powerful, valuable computer applications now usually use quite a lot of math. Really, the bottleneck is the math.Besides, typically in both high school and college, math is much better taught than computing. Moreover, the math has lasted and stands to last and be current much longer than current computing topics.Of course, the computer fair got lots of people to show up, and a math fair would have mostly empty space in an old phone booth.Gee, if I were in high school or college, I’d go to that fair! Why? Some of the girls were pretty, looked really nice, had nice smiles, looked feminine, e.g., careful with their presentations, had endearing expressions, etc.!!!!”Gee, so you are interested in computing! So am I!! How about speeding up binary search? What about getting locality of reference in a busy heap data structure? What do you think about the problem of P versus NP? I skipped lunch and am ready for a snack, and around the corner is a French pastry shop with good coffee. Wanna come?”