Posts from hacking education

The Annual Computer Science Fair

Ten years ago, a small group of folks in the K12 Computer Science Education community in NYC decided to put on a “mock job fair” for high school students who were taking computer science classes in the NYC public schools. That was the start of an annual day of engagement and learning for high schoolers considering a career in tech.

Yesterday we got the Fair back in person after three years of not doing it or doing it remotely. And it was so great to be there. This is a picture of all of the students making their way around the various booths learning about careers in tech.

Most everyone in the tech sector would like to have more diverse companies but there are no easy ways to accomplish that. Ultimately we need to get young people interested in careers in tech much earlier in their schooling and show them what those pathways look like.

This photo is of a team from Justworks doing exactly that.

I want to thank all of the sponsors who made this event possible:

And most of all I would like to thank Jennifer Klopp, Executive Director of Gotham Gives, who led the effort to get the Fair back in person this year and the team at the NYC Public School System, TEALS, and Tech:NYC who helped get the students and the tech companies there.

Yesterday was one of those days for me where a lot of the work I do across different areas of interest comes together in a single place and time. And those are great days for me.

#hacking education#hacking philanthropy

A Conversation With Mike Zamansky

Mike Zamansky is the person who got me interested in K12 Computer Science Education in NYC, a cause I have now contributed almost fifteen years of my life to.

Our family’s public charity, Gotham Gives, has been funding the work we do in K12 Computer Science Education in NYC for the last decade and a month or so ago, the Gotham Gal recorded a podcast with Mike talking about the early days of our journey into K12 Computer Science, how we met, and what transpired.

That podcast is up on YouTube and I’ve embedded it here. It’s about ten minutes long.

#hacking education#hacking philanthropy

Machine Learning and Schools

I read last week that the NYC Department of Education has banned ChatGPT from its networks and devices. I understand that reaction and mentioned the issues that AI/ML create for educators in a post a few weeks ago.

I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the essay as a way for teachers to assess student progress. It will be easier for a student to prompt ChatGPT to write the essay than to write it themselves.

However, I would like to suggest that educators embrace these new tools rather than block them.

We are entering an era when AIs will be available to everyone to use to do work, entertain ourselves, and many other things. We cannot put this genie back in the bottle. We need to embrace it.

I think a better approach would be to require students to use ChatGPT to write an essay or at least help write an essay and then have the students compete to see who can leverage this technology to create the best essay. That would teach the students to use these tools rather than pretend they don’t exist.

I own a slide rule that my dad gave me. He used it for many years until calculators emerged. He told me when calculators first showed up, many educators wanted their students to continue to use slide rules. But eventually, they realized that calculators were better and embraced them.

I think the same thing will happen with AIs. So we might as well get busy integrating them into education instead of banning them.

#hacking education#machine learning

The Hour Of Code

I have written many times about the Hour Of Code here at AVC.

It is the highlight of the annual Computer Science Education Week which is the first week of December, which is this week.

Yesterday Marco Argenti, Goldman Sachs’ CIO, and I went with NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks to the Hospitality Management High School in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan to do an Hour of Code with the students there.

In the class we attended students were using the Scratch programming environment to make a small robot move around a course while also navigating some real world problems.

In this photo you can see three young women with their robot and a laptop with Scratch on it:

At the end of that exercise, the students got the opportunity to ask Marco and his colleagues about working as a software engineer. This is a post the Goldman team wrote about the importance of this work.

Many AVC readers know that getting computer science education into every building in the NYC public schools has been a long standing passion project of mine. It’s hard work getting the business community engaged with this work and supporting it financially.

But every time I get the opportunity to go into the schools and see the teachers and students working on computer science problems, I get a boost of energy in my system to keep going and push even harder.

I was particularly excited and pleased to see Chancellor Banks so engaged and excited about what he saw yesterday.

Chancellor Banks and his team at the Dept of Education are very focused on creating pathways to rewarding careers for their students. The Chancellor calls it his “north star.” So they are a fantastic partner for this work I do and I appreciate everything the DOE, the school leaders, and the teachers do to help the young people of NYC become computational thinkers and be computer literate. It will make a big difference in their lives.

#hacking education

Sign Everything

The advances in AI over the last year are mind-boggling. I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the essay as a way for teachers to assess student progress. It will be easier for a student to prompt ChatGPT to write the essay than to write it themselves.

It is not just language models that are making huge advances. AIs can produce incredible audio and video as well. I am certain that an AI can produce a podcast or video of me saying something I did not say and would not say. I haven’t seen it yet, but it is inevitable.

So what do we do about this world we are living in where content can be created by machines and ascribed to us?

I think we will need to sign everything to signify its validity. When I say sign, I am thinking cryptographically signed, like you sign a transaction in your web3 wallet.

I post my blogs at AVC.com and also at AVC.Mirror.xyz which is a web3 blogging platform that allows me to sign my posts and store them on-chain. This is an attestation at the end of last week’s blog post.

You can see that “author address” and click on it to see that it is one of the various web3 addresses I own/control. That signifies that it was me who posted the blog. It is also stored on-chain on the Arweave blockchain so that the content exists independently of the blogging platform. That is also important to me.

I think AI and Web3 are two sides of the same coin. As machines increasingly do the work that humans used to do, we will need tools to manage our identity and our humanity. Web3 is producing those tools and some of us are already using them to write, tweet/cast, make and collect art, and do a host of other things that machines can also do. Web3 will be the human place to do these things when machines start corrupting the traditional places we do/did these things.

#art#blockchain#bots#crypto#digital collectibles#hacking education#machine learning#non fungible tokens#streaming audio#VC & Technology#Web/Tech#Web3

Tech Year NYC

Tech:NYC is launching a new initiative, Tech Year NYC, which helps young people from underrepresented backgrounds get access to careers in NYC’s fast-growing tech sector.

Tech Year NYC is a rollup of several existing city programs into a single point of entry and engagement for tech companies and students. The idea is to make it easier for local tech companies to engage with this population and easier for the students to get access to these pathways to jobs.

Students are compensated for their participation by the city and industry partners and will come out of the program with professional skills essential to work in the tech sector and additional skill-building opportunities.

Tech Year NYC is an expansion of a project-based learning curriculum that Tech:NYC developed with the Mayor’s Office of Youth Employment back in the summer of 2020 called Summer Bridge. Over the last two years, over 100 tech companies and over 3,000 students have participated in this effort.

The summer 2022 Tech Year NYC pilot will run from July 5th to August 12th and serve over 1,000 students. 500 of these students will continue career exploration and skills development through the fall semester. If and when this pilot proves successful, Tech Year NYC will be expanded to reach many more students and employers.

Tech NYC is recruiting employer partners to lead these 5-week long project-based programs, open your doors for “tech open houses”, and participate in professional skills workshops for these students. You can learn more and register to be an employer partner this summer here.

#employment#hacking education#NYC

Funding Friday: Codrone

I love using robotics to teach kids to code. A K12 teacher told me many years ago, “when the robot doesn’t do what you told it to do, you know your code is wrong and you need to fix it.” Robotics brings code to life for kids and that’s a great thing.

So when I saw this Kickstarter project, Codrone, I backed it immediately. So did 120 other people and so this project is going to come to life. If you want to back it too, you can do so here.

#crowdfunding#hacking education

What Is Going To Happen In 2022

So last year I made a bunch of predictions that with one exception were kind of obvious. I don’t want to do that again, so I am going to list five things that I think will happen this year that most people would not likely agree with.

1/ As the pandemic evolves into an endemic in the first half of 2022, companies will reopen their offices and their employees will largely opt to go back to working together in offices.

I qualified this with “largely” because I don’t think we will go back to everyone in the office again. Companies have become much more comfortable hiring remote employees who don’t live near a company office. Employees have made it clear that they want/need the flexibility to work from home a day or two a week. Some companies have moved to an entirely remote work environment. But I think the dominant form of working will return to “in office, with others” by the end of this year.

2/ Carbon offsets, effectively a voluntary form of self carbon taxation, will take off in 2022 and by the end of the year, we will have a global market in excess of $10bn (up ~10x in 2022).

I think the big unlock will be bridging between the existing carbon offset market and the crypto markets where decentralized finance tools can bring massive innovation and demand to this market very quickly.

3/ K12 systems around the US (and around the world) faced with teacher shortages and desperate to erase several years of learning shortfalls, will increasingly adopt online learning services in the school building in lieu of and in addition to in-class learning.

This may be obvious. I don’t really know. But there are many forms of learning that work in addition and in compliment to teacher-led classes and school leaders will need to be open to using them aggressively to turn around several years of learning losses.

4/ Twitter opens up its APIs and allows anyone to operate Twitter clients that compete with its own.

Now I am going out on a limb. But why not? That would be so amazing if it happened.

5/ As I predicted back in the spring of 2017 [8:30 into this video], only five years too soon, Ethereum’s market cap will surpass Bitcoin’s in 2022. I hope I get at least as much abuse for this prediction as I did for that one.

Ethereum’s merge in 2022, combined with the understanding that productive assets must be worth more than non-productive assets, make this a fairly obvious prediction. But I got it wrong last time, so I surely can get it wrong again.

I hope that 2022 brings us more positive surprises and less negative surprises than the last two years.

Happy 2022 everyone!

#climate crisis#crypto#hacking education#VC & Technology

Computer Science Education Week

The second week of December every year is Computer Science Education Week. It is a week to celebrate efforts to get computer science education into the K12 system around the world, and it is also a week in which schools do events, like The Hour of Code, to encourage students and teachers to get excited about learning computer science.

Most AVC readers know that my passion project for the last decade has been getting computer science education broadly available in the NYC public school system. I have also been involved in efforts to get computer science education adopted around the US and around the world. But my primary focus has been NYC.

This Computer Science Education Week, I celebrated by meeting with a very large employer in NYC and talking about getting that company’s employees deeply engaged with computer science education in the NYC schools and supporting the CS4All Capital Campaign, which I Chair. CS4All is NYC’s ten-year effort to get computer science classes into every school building in NYC by training 5,000 NYC public school teachers to deliver computer science classes. The CS4All Capital Campaign is a $40mm fundraising effort to support CS4All. We are now within spitting distance of the $40mm goal as we are in our seventh year of the campaign and program. If you know any individuals or non-profits or companies that would like to support the capital campaign, reply to this email or hit me up on Twitter and I would love to talk to them.

I also participated in an event at Hunter College last night to discuss their effort to provide computer science certification courses to NYC teachers. This is a program that has run for two years now, led by my friend Mike Zamansky, who I like to call “the godfather of CS education in NYC.” The Hunter computer science certification program is supported by our public charity Gotham Gives and Google. We provide scholarships to high-performing teachers who want to get NYS certified as computer science teachers. If you know individuals, non-profits, or companies that would like to join Gotham Gives and Google supporting this effort, reply to this email or hit me up on Twitter.

My one regret about this computer science education week is that I did not make it into a school building. This is the second year in a row that has been the case and I miss seeing teachers and students working together on projects and problems. My best moments over the years in this work have always been in the schools.

This photo of incoming mayor Eric Adams and former Chancellor Richard Carranza was taken by me at PS24 in Sunset Park Brooklyn during CS Education Week in 2018. I wrote about that visit here.

Computer science is the first new subject to be taught in K12 in 50+ years. Getting it broadly available in schools is hard work and requires commitment and persistence and a massive investment of time and money. But it is all worth it. Seeing the kids get excited about coding brings a big smile to my face every time.

#hacking education#NYC

Funding Friday: Pattern Alphabet cards for exploring nature

Longtime AVC reader Alex Wolf has a Kickstarter project that I think is awesome.

She has long been working on a “pattern alphabet” to encode the patterns of nature and life.

This project turns this alphabet into cards that can be used by kids in school and at home to learn.

I backed the project this morning and I hope and expect she will do great with this Kickstarter project.

Email readers can see the video here.

#crowdfunding#hacking education