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Programming

Amazon Gives Code.org $15 Million To 'Reimagine' Advanced Placement CSA 65

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
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.
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Amazon Gives Code.org $15 Million To 'Reimagine' Advanced Placement CSA More

Amazon Gives Code.org $15 Million To 'Reimagine' Advanced Placement CSA

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  • Why do manager-like people use this type of language?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by SirSpanksALot ( 7630868 )
      You have to use buzzword bingo to get promotions.

    • because they're insecure and need to make them selves seem smarter than they are at every opportunity

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

    • Because they have little imagination of their own.

  • Java's forever bugs need an increase work force in patching it.

  • Find some money in a jacket he hadn't worn in a while or something? This is rather tiny amount coming from them.

    • 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.

  • 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)

    by lsllll ( 830002 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @04:52PM (#61100438)

    From TFA

    In 2020, students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups only made up 14% of AP® CSA exam takers, and young women made up just 25%. We aim to improve upon these numbers by reimagining the structure of the traditional AP CSA curriculum and provide support and resources to assist teachers in delivering an engaging, exciting, and equitable curriculum.

    and

    Teachers have been advocating for the development of an equitable and culturally responsive CSA curriculum: 84% of CS Principles teachers told us last year they want to start teaching CSA using Code.org

    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)

      by Trailer Trash ( 60756 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @05:01PM (#61100462) Homepage

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        >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

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by inhuman_4 ( 1294516 )

      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.

      • Someone else in this story posted a /. article [slashdot.org] from almost a decade ago about a Code.org initiative to try to increase the number of girls in class, or exclude the boys if you want to look at it that way. Considering the targets presented in the summary of that story and the numbers from the previous year listed in the summary of this story, it doesn't seem like they're very successful at excluding boys.

        If someone is really passionate about something there isn't a whole lot you can do to stop them, parti

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by lsllll ( 830002 )
          These people should go suck a bag of dicks. I don't see them trying to promote more women to become a garbage man (who still make pretty good money in the U.S., albeit not compared to a computer programmer) or be up in arms that nursing is still a predominantly female career. Reminds me of the joke by Jeff Wayne about signs he sees that say "Hire women and minorities," to which he responds with "Why don't you just say fuck the white male?"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      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

      • No, that's the excuse they wrap it up in, but even that is absurd. The argument isn't that assignments don't reflect real problems (which they do, but with silly examples), it's that they don't reflect the cultural background of the students, which we are supposed to believe is a problem. That's a bit perverse, given that some students are told they must be exposed to more cultures and lifestyles, while others are told they can't learn unless everything is specifically tailored to reflect their personal b

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ksevio ( 865461 )

          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)

      by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @05:29PM (#61100536) Homepage

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lsllll ( 830002 )
        This. Yes, they don't want to really solve the problem because the problem is hard, so they circumvent it by a superficial band-aid which falls off the moment it gets wet and then they pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
      • To me it looks like they can't tell the difference between a solution and the appearance of a solution. They think there's a problem in the demographics of computer science, so they change the curriculum to change who the students are and call it a success, even though all they have done is artificially alter the variable they say they're trying to measure, breaking computer science in the process.

    • Re:Yeah, that's what I thought. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dmiller1984 ( 705720 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @06:04PM (#61100600)
      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.

      • 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. :/

      • 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

        • 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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lsllll ( 830002 )

          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.

    • 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 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

    • Apparently, one of the "culturally responsive" measures is a focus on "call and response" for the benefit of students with an oral-tradition cultural background. The obvious problem there is that virtually every student is going to have the same, American, cultural background. So, who is it for? First generation immigrants who want and need to assimilate into American culture? A nation can be made up of people from a variety of cultures, but it can only have one if it is going to survive.

      One of the m

  • so after taking billions from all the different states it gives back 15m. What a brilliant trade, give out billions get back 15m. Perhas the states should give out even more billions then they can get back 30m next year. What a brilliant return on investment.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • "Equity" is a system of institutional racism. (Score:3)

    by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Friday February 26, 2021 @08:42AM (#61101806)
    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.

    • 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

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