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Programming Education

The Academy For Software Engineering: a High School For Developers 56

rjmarvin writes "The Academy for Software Engineering, right off of Manhattan's Union Square, is in its second year of educating students for a future in computer science and software engineering. No entrance exams, no admission standards, just an opportunity for any student interested in software to take specialized classes like robotics and programming, go on trips to companies like Google and Facebook, and spend summers interning at Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase before heading to college and into the workforce, powering the next wave of innovation as members of the tech workforce in New York's burgeoning 'Silicon Alley.'"
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The Academy For Software Engineering: a High School For Developers

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  • uhh... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by buddyglass ( 925859 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @08:12AM (#45334965)

    No entrance exams, no admission standards...

    So is it absurdly expensive or do they use a lottery system?

    • Re:uhh... (Score:5, Funny)

      by SJHillman ( 1966756 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @08:19AM (#45335007)

      Like much of the tech sector, they keep costs down by replacing most students with robots and outsourcing the rest to India.

    • Lottery system
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I sometimes believe that RTFA is a not a arcane art but a dying art. Second paragraph under the picture says .......

      "The AFSE has unscreened enrollment, meaning admission decisions aren’t based on academic performance. All students need to do is attend an open house, apply, and hope their lottery number is picked."

    • Like all hopes of economic advancement in the U.S. today, it all hinges on winning the lottery.

  • Trust issue and cynicism trigger.

  • by Bob_Who ( 926234 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @08:51AM (#45335125) Journal

    But why should you do evil and work for the criminals in the financial sector? Have you no sense of ethics ?

    Just because an inner city kid is poor and needs a free education doesn't mean he should do the dirty work.

    JPMorgan owes a lot more than 13 billion and a free tech farm for grooming new corporate fall guys.

    Why should crime pay when its too big to fail, with labor that is too small to pay, except for the dirty work.

    I'm glad for the free school but I can't help but be cynical about Wall Street.

    • by marienf ( 140573 )

      second that.

      Thie program comes with a brainwashing guarantee.
      I mean: Google, Facebook and JPMorgan!

      War is Peace!
      Privacy is a crime!
      Sell your friends!
      Debt is your own fault!
      Shut Up And Shop!

    • by csumpi ( 2258986 )

      JPMorgan owes a lot more than 13 billion

      Chunk of change, compared to the billions the US government sends down the toilet _every_ _single_ _day_. I'm not saying that makes it OK, but we should start looking at the real problems instead of the smoke and mirrors talking points.

      • by Bob_Who ( 926234 )

        JPMorgan owes a lot more than 13 billion

        Chunk of change, compared to the billions the US government sends down the toilet _every_ _single_ _day_. I'm not saying that makes it OK, but we should start looking at the real problems instead of the smoke and mirrors talking points.

        Exactly right. That is the perfect place to start. Suddenly the echo of ideologues' mantras drown out the silent uncertainty that we all must feel as we look at the incomprehensible scale of 330 Million Americans and another 7 billion bound to our international trade agreements. I just have one question, how is that supposed to look in a perfect world? If this looks broken now then what does fixed look like? There is no ideology that can alter the current reality in any significant way. Not Paul Rya

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      But why should you do evil and work for the criminals in the financial sector? Have you no sense of ethics ?

      Just because an inner city kid is poor and needs a free education doesn't mean he should do the dirty work.

      Depends on the goal. Why do people keep wanting to be videogame developers (enough so that the likes of EA can basically pay less than minimum wage and 100 hour weeks)?

      You tell a kid who grew up in poverty that they can get an education that gets them into places like JPMorgan and such? Well damn

  • by sandytaru ( 1158959 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @08:58AM (#45335157) Journal
    Well, some of it. I went to a fine arts high school and I heard from some old classmates that they've started teaching web design in the art classes there - including HTML and lower end web programming. Considering how many of us ended up in IT that may not be a bad idea. Previously, the only tech stuff they taught was theater lighting.

    Can't be any worse than Common Core, regardless.
    • That is all well and good but if we are starting career training in high school where do the students get the breadth of training they need to actually choose what they are interested in?
    • by Grax ( 529699 )
      Lincoln Nebraska has a technology focus program http://itfp.lps.org/ [lps.org]

      In the entertainment industry, it has produced an editor for Pawn Stars and an Emmy winner, among others. I don't have any information on how many successful software developers it has produced.

      http://itfp.lps.org/alumni.html [lps.org] http://itfp.lps.org/graphics/Kelly.htm [lps.org]
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • at least it's better then theory loaded CS colleges where you learn skills that give a big skills gap on the stuff needed to do the job.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Yes, CS is mainly about computational science theory. That's the point.

        No serious CS course is gonna teach Java 7 Programming with Oracle 11g

      • That's debatable. At least with "theory loaded CS colleges" you learn the theory. And, if you have the moxie to get an actual CS degree, you're probably not going to have a lot of trouble filling in that "big skills gap" on your own time, which generally means having knowledge of the programming language/toolkit du jour (and which is, surprisingly enough, what you'll be asked to do on the job as a programmer in the real world - do you really think that companies pay for technology training anymore?).

        For "pu

      • by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @02:24PM (#45338313)

        at least it's better then theory loaded CS colleges where you learn skills that give a big skills gap on the stuff needed to do the job.

        Universities are not vocational schools. If you want to learn the languages and operating systems that are used at a job ***today*** then go to your local junior college (JC) and take the relevant vocational classes. JCs do a fine job in this regard. If you want the theory and background knowledge that is more persistent, that will outlast the programming languages and operating systems that are popular today then you go to the university. In the university you are often expected to learn the programming languages and operating systems of the day on your own time. As you will have to do throughout your career. Even things necessary for class are often on your own time. For example in a compilers class the class time may be mostly spent on compiler theory. You may be offered an optional session led by a TA to introduce you to lex and yacc (used to implement your compiler) but you are expected to learn these mostly on your own. Similar story in AI classes, theory in class, a TA session for LISP or Prolog, but mostly you learn the programming language on your own time. Programming languages and operating systems are implementation details, they change over time. The theory tends to last a bit longer.

        I have two books from the early 1980s. A book on programming MS-DOS and Knuth Volume 3: Sorting and Searching. The former is full of what was once useful info for a job and went into the recycle bin when cleaning out the garage recently. The later is theory and is still a valuable and useful reference today and still sits on my bookshelf.

        If you have a skills gap after the university you made some sort of mistake. At the university you are surround by people (professors and fellow students) with an incredibly variety of skills and knowledge, you have incredible resources (hardware and software) available, if you are not doing some sort of independent study on your own you are making a mistake. If you are doing nothing other than homework assignment on the default hardware using the default languages you are making a mistake, you are making yourself less attractive to employers. Assuming of course you don't have a job or some other "legitimate" demand on your time.

    • by mlts ( 1038732 ) *

      Nail, head hit. What is needed is to teach the basics about languages, so jumping from perl to java to ABAP to Scheme to Ada is a relatively minor item (you figure out syntax, variable convention, etc... perhaps procedural versus lambda based, etc.)

      After these basics, one can learn Java and be a Java dev, but when that peters out, it doesn't take much to grab an O'Reilly guide and start programming in PHP, Python, or perhaps even back to perl.

      In most languages [1], a ring buffer is a ring buffer. A queue

  • The point of this is to turn programmers into even more of a commodity. The idea isn't to produce labor, the idea is to produce cheap domestic labor.
  • by PPH ( 736903 )

    Little Lord Fauntleroy Academy for Albino Hemophiliacs.

  • This is not a new thing. In the 1976 the Mario Umana Harbor School of Science and technology was formed as a partnership between MIT and the Boston Public Schools. We never got tours of Facebook or Google, but that might be because they didn't exist at the time. We got tours of the MIT museums and labs.

    Of course, who doesn't know about the Bronx High School of Science.

Things are not as simple as they seems at first. - Edward Thorp

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