Computer science isn't just for computer scientists anymore
This week, Trevor Noah and I spent time at the Young Women’s Leadership School of Brooklyn to share the role technology has played in our lives and to learn how students are putting computer science skills to work. It’s clear that computer science isn’t just for computer scientists these days – it’s for everyone. It accelerates our learning, discovery and understanding of the world. It’s inspiring to think about the contributions these young women will bring to a wide array of disciplines in the future.
To be successful in the future workplace, we will all need to know some computer science. However, computer science is not yet available to everyone. Today, of the 42,000 U.S. high schools, only 7,665 offered the Advanced Placement course in computer science last year. Of those, only 26 percent of test takers were female, 14 percent were Hispanic/Latino, 5 percent were Black, and 10 percent were from rural communities.
If we want to broaden opportunity, we must close these gaps. We’re helping schools like The Young Women’s Leadership School of Brooklyn expand opportunities to young people through programs like the Hour of Code offered by code.org and through Microsoft TEALS, a program that places volunteers in U.S. high schools to team teach computer science with teachers. The program started in one Seattle classroom in 2009. Today, 1,050 volunteers from 500 companies teach 12,000 students in 344 schools in 29 states plus the District of Columbia.
Through programs like these, Microsoft will continue to work hard to expose more students to computer science. But closing this gap will require a broad collective effort, especially from those of us who work in the tech sector. If you’re working in the tech sector and interested in helping out, I encourage you to join us by volunteering with TEALS. You can learn more here.
--
6 年Computer literacy, more so coding has become such an important aspect of life today. It should be a necessity for kids to learn coding in schools; it’s the only way to ensure everyone gets educated on it.
Computer Science Co-op Student (3rd Year)
6 年Nowadays, automating an Excel sheet is called "coding". We should educate the public and teach them the REAL "coding". Most of them would become scared of programming but they would know that programming is not what they think it is.
The only thing worse than ignorami who know that they are ignorant is ignorami who think that they are not.
IT Applications Administrator at Jabil EMS
6 年Very true indeed. We must all be IT savvy regardless of our career or career aspirations.
Big tech corporations would sure love to get more coders in the workforce, because they pay a lot for programmers. If there were a larger pool of talent to choose from and the demand wasn't so high, they could drastically increase their bottom line by paying their employees less.