CSforAll Summit
There has been a movement growing in K12 public education around the US over the last decade to get computer science into the K12 curriculum and into all schools and in front of all students. The name this movement has taken on is CSforAll and this week in Detroit Michigan, educators from all around the country are meeting to move the CSforAll effort forward. This meeting is called the CSforAll Summit.
Today is the big day and there will be a
I am particularly excited that Luis von Ahn, founder of our portfolio company Duolingo, will speak at the Summit about human computation, invention and entrepreneurship, and why all students need to learn
When educators sign up to participate in the CSforAll Summit, they are asked to make a commitment to expand CS education in their schools and this year those commitments have increased as follows:
– 47mm CS learning opportunities for K-12 Students (nearly a 400 percent increase from 12mm in 2017)
– 246,000 CS educator opportunities (compared to 77,416 in 2017)
These are big numbers, both in absolute numbers and in the rate of growth. It speaks to how seriously the public education sector is taking computer science and related tech skills and the understanding that they are becoming required skills for work and adult life. I am very pleased so see this happening.
Comments (Archived):
and it’s Pixel phone and (especially) Pixelbook(s) day today.
Maybe I will get something to blog about tomorrow
Good man. Looking forward to it.
I was really hoping to make it out to Detroit for this but bad luck timing is keeping me in NY.Perhaps next year.
This is awesome! I am very happy to see folks such as Luis and Code.org founders, Hadi & Ali Partovi are really focused on K-12 education. Really like that they are working on providing tools for the average teacher interested in teaching CS the means necessary to get started.
Excellent! Looking forward to following along from home.
I strongly support that CS should be included in K12 education. CS is as vital now as knowing Newton’s 3 laws. During my time, we have to take expensive private classes to learn CS in high school. We need more online CS classes too.
CS is as vital now as knowing Newton’s 3 lawsExcept that knowing Newton’s 3 laws (to take you literally) is not vital for the overwhelming and vast majority of people. It’s actually a good example of a subject that school requires students to memorize that should be replaced by learning something of actual value later in life. If I was in front of a school board comprised of business people, doctors, lawyers and so on I wouldn’t use that as part of my argument to get more CS education.
> CS is as vital now as knowing Newton’s 3 laws.Yup, so let’s see:See the real problem, and design the software solution via the classic engineering technique of “divide and conquer”.So, have a Main program:Define storage.Read in data.Manipulate data to get solution.Write out solution.Catch unexpected conditions.Return.End.As part of divide and conquer, for the reading, manipulating, and writing, likely do that in functions or subroutines. There the main tools areAllocate storage.Free storage.Evaluate an expression and assign the result.If-Then-Else.Do-While.Catch unexpected conditions.ReturnAs Bugs Bunny used to say, “That’s all Folks!!!”I’ve been writing code on hardware and operating systems back to Fortran IV, Algol, the original Kemeny Basic, PLI (my favorite language), various assembler languages, now .NET, and more, and the outline above I still my first view of coding.Compared with Newton’s laws, even just his second law, the laws and coding are now likely of equal importance in our science, technology, economy, and society. For difficulty, quickly Newton’s laws can get deep into potential theory and partial differential equations, the wave equation and the Navier-Stokes equations, and coding can quickly get into cryptography and P versus NP; so, tough to say that one is more difficult or intricate than the other.
Incredible expansion of CS education in youth. I hope there is a netiquette section in childhood CS courses.