Amazon Gives Code.org $15 Million To 'Reimagine' Advanced Placement CSA 65
theodp writes: Amazon on Wednesday announced it has lined up the support of Governors and State School Superintendents from five 'key states' for a pilot that aims to reimagine the Java-based Advanced Placement Computer Science A (AP CS A) course taken by high school students for college credit. By doing so, Amazon indicated it hopes to address "the diversity gaps in today's technology workforce."
From the press release: "Amazon's signature computer science education program, Amazon Future Engineer, is trying to help close those gaps by donating $15 million to Code.org over three years. The money will support the creation of the new equity-minded curriculum and other initiatives designed to reach more students from underrepresented groups. The initiatives aim to increase student awareness of academic and career pathways in computer science as well as equip them to be successful in college-level computer science and beyond. Working together, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal of doubling the participation of students from underrepresented groups in AP CSA within five years of the course's launch."
After CEO Jeff Bezos came under fire [PDF] last summer for the company's continued resistance to making its EEO-1 diversity regulatory filing public, Amazon finally agreed to publicly disclose its race, gender and ethnicity workforce data sometime in 2021.
From the press release: "Amazon's signature computer science education program, Amazon Future Engineer, is trying to help close those gaps by donating $15 million to Code.org over three years. The money will support the creation of the new equity-minded curriculum and other initiatives designed to reach more students from underrepresented groups. The initiatives aim to increase student awareness of academic and career pathways in computer science as well as equip them to be successful in college-level computer science and beyond. Working together, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal of doubling the participation of students from underrepresented groups in AP CSA within five years of the course's launch."
After CEO Jeff Bezos came under fire [PDF] last summer for the company's continued resistance to making its EEO-1 diversity regulatory filing public, Amazon finally agreed to publicly disclose its race, gender and ethnicity workforce data sometime in 2021.
"Reimagine" (Score:2)
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Re: "Reimagine" (Score:4, Funny)
That is doing the hard way. I submitted a proposal that was nothing more than the word diversity copied and pasted 1,600 times. I was made VP of Diversity and I have not even mastered shoelaces.
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because they're insecure and need to make them selves seem smarter than they are at every opportunity
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It reflects their courage to propose an advanced CS curriculum where it doesn't matter whether your source code is correct according to the oppressive dictates of the compiler, or whether your program follows an externally imposed specification rather than your own imagination.
Furthermore, "maintainability" and "efficiency" of code are regressive goals. Principles of equity are offended by the use of "n" as a racist shorthand for variables that are constrained to only take integer values, rather than to fr
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I'm not aware of any penalty for lying on it.
It is not possible to lie if there are no objective criteria. There is nothing specific that differentiates an African from a European. We all share 99% of our DNA, and the other 1% varies far more within Africa than between Africans and non-Africans.
In some states, people were once considered legally black if they had "one drop" of African blood. In others, it was 1/32nd. Today there is no legal threshold anywhere in America.
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I know folks from south Africa with families going back 3 or 4 generations there , who have white skin. If they move here, are the 'African Americans'?
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The only post on this page that mentions him is yours.
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Someone needs to develop a way to easily convey tone through text.
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It's a joke.
Sorry. I am an Aspie, so my humor detector doesn't work well.
But I am not alone. Humor impairment [chicagotribune.com] is a common affliction.
Someone needs to develop a way to easily convey tone through text.
We have the "/s" tag for sarcasm. Perhaps we could all agree to use "/f" for "funny".
In fact, if we can change the ADA to recognize Aspies as a protected class, we could require all attempts at humor to be so marked. /f
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Sorry. I am an Aspie, so my humor detector doesn't work well.
It could have also just been a shit joke. I browse at -1 so I end up reading a lot of off topic comments that bring up Elon Musk through tenuous connections to the story and a lot of complaints about him. Since he's South African I considered it a funny connection, or at least I did at the time. Now, I'm pretty sure it's a shit joke even if other people might have made the same connection.
Adding a "/s" almost feels like it ruins it a bit though, not so much in the sense that it let's everyone in on the f
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and the other 1% varies far more within Africa than between Africans and non-Africans.
That would literally violate metric properties of whatever metrics you're using. You can't have a European genetically close to either of two Africans AND the two Africans being substantially farther away from each other any more than I can stand two meters away from two people with those two people being ten meters away from each other.
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You could stand 2 meters away from two people and those two people be standing 4 meters plus your thickness away from each other though...
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What is actually true, though, is that there is more genetic diversity in the indigenous sub-Sarahan African population than in the indigenous Eurasian population. Which is one piece of evidence that is used to suggest an out-of-Africa story of the origins of Eurasian populations.
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I'm Canadian, so I don't know how this sort of thing works elsewhere. I know sometimes when I have to fill things out, there is an optional section for me to specify data like that. It's little more than a list of check boxes, and an "other" field where I could specify, things like if I identify as a French-Canadian or a First Nation etc.
I'd always assumed this was for statistical purposes, and that it probably wouldn't result in any sort of fact checking or followup as It sort of resembles the type of qu
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Government might have requirements for businesses.
Ok, I thought it was a joke until I realized (Score:2)
Java's forever bugs need an increase work force in patching it.
Did Bezos? (Score:1)
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No matter how much he gives, someone will complain that it isn't enough.
About 150,000 students take either CS-A or CS-P each year. So $15M is about $100 per student. That seems generous to me.
Blacks, Hispanics, and females are way underrepresented, so there is plenty of room for growth.
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I don't understand the focus on testing or even later down the line. If you want more minority computer scientists, you need to teach more minorities computer science. Changing the test won't help them learn.
Reimagine? (Score:1)
What? As a platypus?
Noting that universities really care less if a student had AP CS passes (CS requires Calculus and Physics typically), and employers care even less that that.
Yeah, that's what I thought. (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA
and
What are we talking about? Choosing sensitive variable names? Is this about the master/slave terminology? How do you make a computer science course "culturally responsive"? There is nothing, and I absolutely mean NOTHING, in any of my computer science text books from college (which I still have) which has anything remotely close to them being called "culturally insensitive". The reason "students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups only made up 14% of AP® CSA exam takers" has nothing to do with the curriculum and everything with their background and situation. This is nothing but a big fucking waste of time, money, energy, and focus.
Re:Yeah, that's what I thought. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes I honestly think our culture's fucked. Seriously. We have no real external enemies and so people are fighting imaginary, divisive bullshit instead.
The sciences - including computer science - are based on objective reality. There's nothing here to do with "equality", "equity", or whatever you want to push this year. This isn't the "gender studies" department. We don't have the luxury of just making up random shit and pretending it's real. Our stuff either works or it doesn't - and if it doesn't the world doesn't work correctly and people can even die. This is serious.
I'd like to see more black and Hispanic folks in the tech industry, but only because they've historically not done as well and there are a lot of good-paying jobs here.
That said, getting people the training they need is separate from making our courses "culturally responsible" or whatever bullshit some sociologists came up with. Tech is what it is. If you can't handle it as it is we can't help you.
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>The sciences - including computer science - are based on objective reality.
you're not keeping up on your progressive wokeness.
I wish I was making this up, but an indoctrination manual, err, "teaching guidelines" that came into the news a couple of weeks ago brainwashes, err, "wakes" that we need to understand that thing that there is a single answer to a math problem is "white supremacy culture."
So is any notion of "objective", and . . .
hawk, living in the wrong century
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We're talking about excluding white and asian boys from the program. PR has to beat around the bush because if you say it plainly it sounds racist.
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If someone is really passionate about something there isn't a whole lot you can do to stop them, parti
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I think from what I read they're trying to make it more reflective of real world problems and programming. When I took the test a while back it was all about fish or something and didn't really have any practical applications. If it could instead be solving real world problems (even if they're small and already solved) it would be more engaging for students and more useful of a course.
But yeah I'm sure it's the master/slave stuff that Java totally uses
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If you always portray programmers as overweight white guys, that's all it's going to be attractive to. It's a little hard for people that are already in that group to see that a curriculum is tailored to them already.
Re:Yeah, that's what I thought. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly like Oregon declaring math to be racist. The woke people of the world are determined that equal outcomes must exist, despite unequal backgrounds, unequal interest, and many other factors. They want easy solutions to hard problems.
The Amazon press release contains literally nothing but pictures of black kids, so it is entirely clear what they are talking about. Large parts of the US black population have serious problems: unstable families, contempt for education, gang activity, crime, drugs, etc.. No surprise that they are underrepresented in areas such as programming. US blacks are also underrepresented in engineering, medicine, law, architecture, and anything else that requires a serious education.
This is not a problem for programming education to solve. The underlying issues must be addressed first: stable families, parents who support the education of their children, an ethnic culture that supports education, decent schools to get that education (no drugs, no gang activity, competent teachers, etc.). Those are hard problems, but as long as they remain unsolved, you literally cannot solve the follow-on problems. Fix the foundation, and the rest will follow automatically.
So Amazon donates $15 million. That's nothing to them, but it gets them lots of free publicity. That's what they're really buying here - this came out of the advertising budget.
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Re:Yeah, that's what I thought. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Most people aren’t going to be of the caliber of Blake Ross.
Yes that question is easy but AP CS A is only meant to be credit for a low level intro courses that many majors take, not just hard core CS types
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There isn't necessarily anything in the APCS curriculum that is cultural insensitive, but the way it is taught can sometimes turn off girls. In my doctoral dissertation, I interviewed teachers of AP Computer Science who had a higher-than average number of girls in their classes. One of the key things all of these teachers did was teach the course with a focus on connecting computer science to the real world. A stereotypical boy doesn't care about connecting programming to anything and is fine just programming for the sake of programming. A stereotypical girl can enjoy programming just as much, but is more prone to latch on to it if it is something real-world/meaningful instead of another Towers of Hanoi-type program. This isn't teaching to be culturally sensitive, it is also just good teaching in general. A lot of CS teachers just teach the way they were taught, and that isn't always the best approach to take.
An import thing here is it will draw in a wider variety of people in general, non-stereotypical boys, etc., like you said, it's just good teaching.
I know you know that, I'm talking to the "it's sexist against men" turds floating around here. :/
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It is meaningful/real-world in the sense it helps them pass coding interviews.
It my entire 10+ year professional career, I have never once used a linked list, never once written a recursive routine or had to solve a problem using dynamic programming, and have rarely used structures like stacks and queues. I don't even think I've bothered with dictionaries/maps. Yet if you go by the standards of what employers are demanding candidates demonstrate during coding interviews, these things should be all over th
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It is meaningful/real-world in the sense it helps them pass coding interviews.
It my entire 10+ year professional career, I have never once used a linked list, never once written a recursive routine or had to solve a problem using dynamic programming, and have rarely used structures like stacks and queues. I don't even think I've bothered with dictionaries/maps. Yet if you go by the standards of what employers are demanding candidates demonstrate during coding interviews, these things should be all over the place.
What I meant by "real-world" was not real to the programming world, but projects that connect to other fields of study. For example, in my intro programming classes, one of the projects we do is a verb conjugator. Most of the students create one to conjugate Spanish verbs, but some choose other languages. It's a simple program (ignoring irregular verbs), but useful for those who are taking a language class. In my AP class, their final project is to create a program that does something good for their local
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It my entire 10+ year professional career, I have never once used a linked list, never once written a recursive routine
I have used both. I even used linked lists on database tables and recursive routines in scripting languages, but the point of teaching those is not just to teach the technique. It is because they actually solve some problems way more elegantly that otherwise.
It means four things (Score:3)
There are four pillars. One is to use multiple teaching methodologies like "call and response" (which sounds like shitty rote learning to me), because students of different backgrounds learn differently. Leaving aside the specific example, using multiple methodologies helps avoiding leaving people behind. People do learn differently an
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One of the m
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Re: "... its race, ..." (Score:2)
No, racism *literally* is defined as "believing in race theories"! (Just like aetherism is the belief in pre-Einsteinian aether theories.)
At least everywhere outside the US reality distortion bubble.
Even hatred is not part of the original definition! (Though discrimination is.)
E.g. somebody who thinks there are races, but that people being different is a good thing, is also a racist. Duh. Bit since those are non-existent,it shifted to generally people who hate "other races" too.
The race theories have been d
Wow (Score:2)
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"Equity" is a system of institutional racism. (Score:3)
"Equity" is a racist lie. The only path to equality is to treat everyone equally. Their outcomes will never be the same, everyone is different and everyone is responsible for carving out their own destiny. Equality is what lets them do so, equity means your destiny is in someone else's uncaring hands.
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Calls for "equity" are explicit demands for people to be treated differently on the basis of their skin color. That is racism. They call for people to be treated differently on the basis of their sex. This is sexism.
"Equity" is a racist lie. The only path to equality is to treat everyone equally. Their outcomes will never be the same, everyone is different and everyone is responsible for carving out their own destiny. Equality is what lets them do so, equity means your destiny is in someone else's uncaring hands.
You're putting words in people's mouths so you can beat up a straw man. It's not a good look. Nothing on the linked pages I read is remotely, even in the slightest way, what you accuse them of.
It doesn't matter what you call it, equity, fairness, impartiality, but reflecting to find things that contribute to lopsided demographics in our workforce or academic environments, and enacting change that benefits everyone, is a Good Thing (tm). You have absolutely no evidence of racism or sexism, and I know what