Posts from software engineering

A few months ago, I read about this amazing program called TEALS that allows software engineers to stop by a local school on their way to work and teach computer science to high school students. I thought "what an amazing idea".

Fast forward and I am happy to tell you that TEALS is coming to NYC this fall. About a dozen public high schools in NYC have expressed interest and the final group of participating schools will be nailed down in the next few weeks.

The way this works is a software engineer literally stops by the school on his or her way to work, teaches the class in partnership with one of the existing teachers in the school, and is out the door on the way to work before any of his or her colleagues is out of bed. The TEALS program teaches two classes, an Intro To CS class based on the Berkeley curriculum, and an AP CS class based on the University of Washington curriculum. Software engineers who choose to participate get trained during the summer to teach one or both, and then they teach up to a few days a week on the way to work.

THE ASK: We need to recruit up to 50 software engineers here in NYC to make this a reality. The first info session is next Monday, March 4th, at 6pm. It will be held at the Microsoft office in midtown. If you would like to attend, let us know, and we will put you on the RSVP list.

There will be a second info session at USV on March 20th at 6pm and Kevin Wang, founder of TEALS, will be talking at the NY Tech Meetup on the evening of March 19th as well. So if you can't make next monday evening, there will be a few more chances to learn about this amazing program.

In other "CS in NYC schools" news, the the Dept of Education is rolling out a CS curriculum in 20 middle schools and high schools this fall. The Mayor will announce the 20 schools that are getting this CS curriculum today. There will be participating schools in all 5 boroughs. Approximately 50 students per school will participate, so this program will reach around 1,000 students, starting this fall. 

And there are a number of other interesting programs bubbling up all around the city which I can't or shouldn't talk about yet. All of this happening in addition to the dedicated school model (AFSE) that I have written about a few times here at AVC. This is all a reflection of the dedication of folks in City Hall and the DOE to bring more CS opportunities to our kids here in NYC. It's a fantastic thing and I am very excited by all of this.

NOTE: MBA Mondays is taking a break, probably for just this monday, but it could be a bit longer. I need to figure out where to go next.

The Academy For Software Engineering (AFSE) is opening in a few weeks. Roughly 125 high school freshmen will be starting a four year program that is designed to prepare them for secondary education if they want that and also for a career in software engineering and web development.

The inspiration for AFSE was the computer science program that Mike Zamansky has built at Stuyvesant High School in NYC over the past 15 years. When I first went to visit Mike at Stuy a few years ago, I walked into his office through a room where a bunch of his students were hanging out after school. These high school students could have headed home after school, or they could have hit the streets. But instead they were hanging out writing code, listening to music, playing video games, and in general geeking out together. I thought "this is where the magic happens."

So when we negotiated with the DOE for space for AFSE at the Washington Irving Campus, I was insistent that we create something similar for AFSE. We got a room and Frank Denbow is leading the effort to deck it out.

He needs the following stuff:

Furniture: Bean bag chairs, couches, small tables, tv stands

Electronics: TVs, game systems, speakers

Books: Technology, entrepreneurship, etc

Misc: Anything else that you think might be interesting to high school students interested in computer science

If you can help, please email Frank @ frank at startupthreads dot com.

I got a tweet from a bot that told me yesterday was my fifth anniversary on Twitter.

@fredwilson Happy 5th TwBirthday! You've been around since 12 March 2007! twbirthday.com/fredwilson/

— TwBirthday (@TwBirthday) March 11, 2012

 

That got me thinking about how long I'd been doing the things I do every day on the Internet. And I responded with this tweet last night.

 

Ive been tweeting for five years today. Blogging for almost nine. Browsing for eighteen. Emailing for twenty three. Computing for thirty six

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) March 11, 2012

 

It was at age fourteen that I started going down to the West Point computer center and playing around with the mainframes they had there. It was 1975 and I was going into ninth grade. It was super cool to be able to create things on the computer. We mostly hacked up graphics stuff and crude computer games. And we didn't go often. There were only certain times of the week we could go and it was a bit of a walk from our home.

Contrast that to today. I met with about 140 eighth graders yesterday at one of our Academy For Software Engineering open houses. These kids don't have to walk a mile to a computer center that is only open to them a few hours a week in order to hack around. They have laptops in their schools and many of them have laptops at home.

When I meet with these eighth graders I like to ask them "if you had the coding skills to build anything, what would you build?" The answers are inspiring. One young man told me he wanted to build a better operating system. He was going to fork a version of linux and do just that. 

 

Me to a room of 8th graders "what do you want to build w/ coding skills?" one student "I want to build a better operating system" #impressed

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) March 11, 2012

 

Another eighth grader said he wanted to build a better social network, one that was based on the things that interested him and one that would connect him with kids around the world that were interested in the same things.

The girls in the room were full of ideas as well. They haven't yet reached the age when they are told they shouldn't be software engineers. I hope they can become accomplished software engineers before anyone tells them that.

These eighth graders were mostly born in 1998. They are the same age as Google. They have never known a world without a browser, a search engine, and a way to connect instantly to people on the Internet. They expect things to work a certain way and when they don't, they want to fix them. They are hackers by default.

If there is anything I've learned in the past few weeks as I've met between five hundred and a thousand eighth graders throughout the NYC public school system, it is that computers and the Internet are front and center in this generation's brain regardless of upbringing.

I suspect that is because this next generation has had access to computers in a way that preceding generations did not. As the cost and form factor of powerful computers comes down, computing reaches a broader segment of the population of America and eventually the world. And it is human nature to want to understand, control, and fix the things that you use every day.

So hacker culture is spreading from those with means to a much broader population. And this is happening on a global scale. It's impossible to comprehend what the result of this shift will be. But I think it's going to be transformative in many ways.

Six weeks ago I wrote a post talking about a new NYC public high school called the Academy For Software Engineering. I wrote that post the day after Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced the creation of this new high school in his State Of The City speech.

In the six weeks since that post, a lot has happened and I want to give everyone an update.

First, and most importantly, we have a leader for the school. His name is Seung Yu. His first name is pronounced like sing. He's been in several new high schools working directly for the Principal waiting for his opportunity to lead a new school and now he has found it. I've been working very closely with Seung for the past four weeks and I'm really impressed with his passion and commitment and considerable talents. 

We are now recruiting the first class of 9th graders. Today and tomorrow are big days as we will be at the citywide High School Fair at Martin Luther King Jr High School on the Upper West Side. The fair is on from 10am to 2pm both days this weekend and Seung and I will be there along with many of the folks on the school's advisory board. Next week on Tuesday night there is an open house for parents and students at Google's office and next weekend there is an open house for parents and students at NYU. And there is one more open house the following week at NYU. If you know any students who are going into ninth grade and are a fit for this school, please tell them and their parents to come to the High School Fair and the Open Houses. That's the best way for them to get into this school.

We also have a full blown web presence now. We have a website, a twitter, and a facebook page. I'd like to thank Sean Gallagher for his tireless and excellent work on all of our physical and virtual brand presence. Sean is creative, technical, and hilarious. His sense of humor and vision will be plastered on this school for many years to come.

I'd also like to thank AVC community member Larry Erlich who left a comment on that first post six weeks ago that he was gifting the school a handful of web domains. That was the gift that kept giving and giving. With Larry's help, we assembled a bunch of domains, decided to use afsenyc.org, and lit that one up. Larry has also helped with a bunch of stuff around getting our web presence live. He's an example of what makes this community so great and why it is such a force.

There are literally dozens of people in the NYC tech community who have given massive amounts of their time for this school. The advisory board has people on it from many of the big and small tech companies in NYC. It is led by Evan Korth of NYU who has become a full partner in this effort. Evan's research interest is K-12 computer science education and he's getting a real-time live immersion in that right now.

Finally, I need to call out the NYC DOE. It's easy to dismiss government as big, slow, dumb, bureaucratic, and ineffective. I know I've been guilty of that myself. But I have to tell you that the DOE has impressed me again and again in this effort. The folks we work with are smart, committed, decisive, and most surprisingly, they are risk takers. There are too many of them to mention here, but they know who they are and I am extremely grateful for their efforts to get this school off the ground.

I'll end with a video that the folks at Makerbot (also on the advisory board) put together to explain this school and what its all about to the parents and students who are considering it. Please pass this on to any 8th graders you know in the NYC school system that you think might like to go to a high school and learn how to make software. 

A number of years ago, I wrote a blog post talking about the need to teach middle school and high school students how to write software. In the comments (where the good stuff happens), a Google engineer told me to go down to Stuyvesant High School and meet a teacher named Mike Zamansky who had taught him to write code in high school. So I did that and thus begun my education into the world of computer science education in the NYC public high school system. What I learned was that other than Mike's program at Stuyvesant and a few other small programs, there wasn't much. So began my quest to see more computer science and software engineering in the NYC public school system. 

Yesterday I went up to the Morris High School in the Bronx to watch Mayor Bloomberg's State of The City Address. In a speech that was largely about the intertwined nature of education and the economy, he announced that the city is opening The Academy For Software Engineering this fall in the Union Square neighborhood of New York City. It was a proud moment for me and Mike Zamansky, who was seated next to me on the stage.

I want to personally thank the Mayor, his education team led by Dennis Walcott, and his economic development team led by Robert Steel for adopting an integrated set of technology, economic development, and education policies and then aggressively rolling them out city wide. The Academy For Software Engineering is just one part of a much bigger strategy of developing new industries and new jobs in New York City and making sure we have the education resources, both in K-12 and at the college/university level, to properly staff these new industries.

The Academy Of Software Engineering is not a "specialized school." It will be open to all students as part of the high school admissions process in NYC. The City's goal (and mine too) is to open up opportunities for many more students than the small number of specialized schools can deliver. Hopefully the curriculum that is developed and teachers that are trained at the Academy will get rolled out into high schools all over the city in the coming years.

The Gotham Gal and I have provided the initial financial support to hire a new schools team and recruit a top notch Principal. But we do not want to be front and center in this story. The team at the DOE and City Hall that has brought this school to life and the Advisory Board of educators and industry leaders (led by Evan Korth of NYU) should get way more credit for what has happened to date. And we will need more financial and industry support (as well as a fantastic Principal) to make this school a success. So if you would like to join us in this effort, please email me via the contact link at the bottom of this blog and let me know how you would like to help. This is an ambitious effort and we will need it.