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Submission + - Amazon Board Member Andrew Ng Pushing States for CS+AI HS Graduation Requirement

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "We're pleased to welcome Dr. Andrew Ng to our Board of Directors effective April 9, 2024," Amazon announced last week, noting that AI legend Ng is the Managing General Partner of AI Fund, a venture studio that supports entrepreneurs to build AI companies." Among AI Fund's investments is Kira Learning, a STEM-focused K-12 education publisher that aims to transform computer science and AI education for young learners. Kira, where Ng is Chairman, is partnering with the State of Tennessee to implement the state's new computer science high school graduation requirement. Tennessee lawmakers earned praise in a VentureBeat op ed (Schools Should Teach AI to Every Child) penned by Ng and Kira CEO and co-founder Andrea Pasinetti. Ng and Pasinetti were both signatories to a letter issued by the CEOs for CS, part of a campaign coordinated by tech-backed nonprofit Code.org that was credited with pressuring the nation's Governors into signing a compact agreeing to make their states' children more CS-savvy (signers included TN Gov Bill Lee). Ng's and Kira's efforts to convince state officials of the need to make CS a high school graduation requirement don't stop there.

News sites, state legislature websites, and social media have noted the lobbying efforts of CS Forward, an advocacy group that calls for "Computer Science Education In Every State" and notes it "unites non-profits, educators, companies, and community leaders in advocating for state computer science graduation requirements." On its About page, CS Forward explains, "Our mission is to ensure every K-12 student masters CS and AI coding. We're here to influence state legislation, budget allocations and shape public policy." A graphic on the page hints at the advocacy group's ties to Kira Learning, as does the presence of Kira Chairman Ng and Kira co-founder and Director of AI Applications Jagriti Agrawal on CS Forward's Advisory Board (Kira's Head of Public Affairs Dave Brown also does double-duty as the Director of CS Forward). CS Forward recently celebrated a legislative victory that saw the Louisiana House of Representatives vote 102-1 to pass a CS high school graduation requirement. A graphic circulated on Twitter alerting the LA Senate of the near-unanimous vote sported the logos of CS Forward, Kira, Code.org, and Code.org Platinum Supporters ($3+ million) Amazon & Microsoft. California State legislature records note that the same five groups registered support for requiring CS for high school graduation in CA. CS Forward LinkedIn posts cite additional efforts to pass bills expanding CS education and making it a high school graduation requirement in Indiana (mission accomplished), Washington (defeated, despite help from Code.org), Iowa, and Minnesota.

Ng has argued that "Laws to ensure AI applications are safe, fair, and transparent are needed." Which begs the question: Are laws also needed to ensure K-12 AI+CS education lobbying is transparent?

Submission + - Teen Girls Confront an Epidemic of Deepfake Nudes in Schools

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: At Macworld Expo 1998, the NY Times reported, Steve Jobs unveiled new software that he explained could be used to give your daughters a Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover (video). A quarter of a century later, the NY Times reports that middle and high school students are using AI software to fabricate explicit nude images of female classmates and share the doctored pictures.

From the article: "Blindsided last year by the sudden popularity of A.I.-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, schools across the United States scurried to contain the text-generating bots in an effort to forestall student cheating. Now a more alarming A.I. image-generating phenomenon is shaking schools. Boys in several states have used widely available 'nudification' apps to pervert real, identifiable photos of their clothed female classmates, shown attending events like school proms, into graphic, convincing-looking images of the girls with exposed A.I.-generated breasts and genitalia. In some cases, boys shared the faked images in the school lunchroom, on the school bus or through group chats on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, according to school and police reports."

So, to paraphrase the flying car trope: They promised us AI would help all students achieve their educational goals, instead we got deepfake nudes and plagiarism and cheating.

Submission + - Code.org Launches AI Teaching Assistant for Grades 6-10 in Stanford Partnership 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: From a Wednesday press release: "Code.org, in collaboration with The Piech Lab at Stanford University, launched today its AI Teaching Assistant, ushering in a new era of computer science instruction to support teachers in preparing students with the foundational skills necessary to work, live and thrive in an AI world. [...] Launching as a part of Code.org's leading Computer Science Discoveries (CSD) curriculum [for grades 6-10], the tool is designed to bolster teacher confidence in teaching computer science." EdWeek reports that in a limited pilot project involving twenty teachers nationwide, the AI computer science grading tool cut one middle school teacher's grading time in half. Code.org is now inviting an additional 300 teachers to give the tool a try. "Many teachers who lead computer science courses," EdWeek notes, "don’t have a degree in the subject—or even much training on how to teach it—and might be the only educator in their school leading a computer science course."

Stanford's Piech Lab is headed by assistant professor of CS Chris Piech, who also runs the wildly-successful free Code in Place MOOC (30,000+ learners and counting), which teaches fundamentals from Stanford’s flagship introduction to Python course. Prior to coming up with the new AI teaching assistant, which automatically assesses Code.org students' JavaScript game code, Piech worked on a Stanford Research team that partnered with Code.org nearly a decade ago to create algorithms to generate hints for K-12 students trying to solve Code.org's Hour of Code block-based programming puzzles (2015 paper). And several years ago, Piech's lab again teamed with Code.org on Play-to-Grade, which sought to "provide scalable automated grading on all types of coding assignments" by analyzing the game play of Code.org students' projects. Play-to-Grade, a 2022 paper noted, was "supported in part by a Stanford Hoffman-Yee Human Centered AI grant" for AI Tutors to Help Prepare Students for the 21st Century Workforce. That project also aimed to develop a "Super Teaching Assistant" for Piech's Code in Place MOOC. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who was present for the presentation of the 'AI Tutors' work he and his wife funded, is a Code.org Diamond Supporter ($1+ million).

Submission + - AI's Impact on CS Education Likened to Calculator's Impact on Math Education

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In Generative AI and CS Education, the new Global Head and VP of Google.org Maggie Johnson writes: "There is a common analogy between calculators and their impact on mathematics education, and generative AI and its impact on CS education. Teachers had to find the right amount of long-hand arithmetic and mathematical problem solving for students to do, in order for them to have the “number sense” to be successful later in algebra and calculus. Too much focus on calculators diminished number sense. We have a similar situation in determining the 'code sense' required for students to be successful in this new realm of automated software engineering. It will take a few iterations to understand exactly what kind of praxis students need in this new era of LLMs to develop sufficient code sense, but now is the time to experiment."

Johnson's CACM article echoes comments she made in a featured talk called The Future of Computational Thinking at last year's Blockly Summit (Blockly is the Google technology that powers drag-and-drop coding IDE's used for K-12 CS education, including Scratch and Code.org). Envisioning a world where AI generates code and humans proofread it, Johnson explained: "One can imagine a future where these generative coding systems become so reliable, so capable, and so secure that the amount of time doing low-level coding really decreases for both students and for professionals. So, we see a shift with students to focus more on reading and understanding and assessing generated code and less about actually writing it. [...] I don't anticipate that the need for understanding code is going to go away entirely right away [...] I think there will still be at least in the near term a need to understand read and understand code so that you can assess the reliabilities, the correctness of generated code. So, I think in the near term there's still going to be a need for that." In the following Q&A, Johnson is caught by surprise when asked whether there will even be a need for Blockly at all in the AI-driven world she describes, which she concedes there may not be.

Johnson's call to embrace AI to "raise the level of abstraction for software engineers" to boost their productivity comes as she exits the Board of Code.org, the tech-backed K-12 CS education nonprofit that pushed coding — including Java — into K-12 schools, but deviated a bit from their 'rigorous CS' mission last year to launch a new TeachAI initiative with tech industry partners to convince K-12 schools to embrace AI to increase the productivity of teachers and students not only in CS, but also in all other areas of education. Johnson's departure from Code.org — she was a founding Board member in 2013 — follows that of Microsoft President Brad Smith, Code.org's other founding Board member from industry, who has been focused on promoting Microsoft's AI efforts. Unlike Google, Microsoft is still represented on Code.org's Board by CTO Kevin Scott, who is credited with forging Microsoft's OpenAI partnership (with Smith and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella) and whose assistant Dee Templeton joined OpenAI's Board as Microsoft's nonvoting observer in January following Sam Altman's reinstatement as OpenAI's CEO. Hey, it's a small K-12 CS and AI education world!

Submission + - Gates Foundation Gives $500K to Model Karlie Kloss's Free Coding Camp for Girls

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In March, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation committed $500,000 to Kode With Klossy Incorporated for general operating support. Kode with Klossy, a charity founded by supermodel Karlie Kloss, operates free coding camps for girls aged 13-18.

Last September, Kloss spoke about coding at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Goalkeepers event in New York City during a panel moderated by Phoebe Gates (BillG's daughter) on The Power of the Women's Potential: "You know, it was almost a decade ago I started Kode with Klossy out of just my own curiosity of what this thing that I kept hearing code was. And I was meeting all these entrepreneurs, building technology, transforming the world, and I wanted to understand what they knew that I and many others didn't know. And this superpower of code. And coding, really what I realized, is a language and a language that can allow you to write your own destiny, write your own narrative and solve problems that you're most passionate about. And to me, that is the ultimate definition of agency."

Kloss has credited Codecademy and Flatiron School for teaching her to code. Both startups received early funding from Thrive Capital, the VC firm headed by Kloss's then-boyfriend and now-husband Joshua Kushner. Before it was sold to WeWork, Flatiron School also helped Kloss create Kode With Klossy.

Submission + - Things Programmers Say On 4/1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Developers, tell me it's April Fool's Day without telling me it's April Fool's Day: @ "Don't worry about missed deadlines — we're using Agile, Scrum, and Jira now!" @ "I can't believe how much money and time we've saved with the Cloud!" @ "Thanks to ChatGPT, you can cut all my coding and testing time estimates by half! @ "Why would I resent being micromanaged by a Product Manager who can't be bothered to seek my input or try to understand what I do?" @ "Don't worry about quality, we've tested every line of code with every possible combination of data values!" @ "Thank goodness our Sr. Management is being advised by Accenture, McKinsey, and Gartner!" @ "Of course, we can block every bad thing on the Internet with a minimal staff!" @ "Just because this has never worked anywhere else doesn't mean it can't work here!" @ "We can always cut back on coding and testing time to make sure we get these PowerPoint presentations right!" @ "Hey, why don't we get people who no longer program to dictate the programming/architecture standards that must be followed?" @ "Just because Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft PhDs make mistakes doesn't mean we should expect any less than a 0% error rate from our people!" @ "There's no excuse for testing with anything but fully synthetic data when the tools make it so simple for even the most complicated data!" @ "I thought it'd be impossible to identify everywhere that data comes from, how it's transformed, where it goes, and how it's used and by whom, but Data Governance and Audit did the hard part by giving us with Excel templates (with no filled-in examples) to fill out to document it all!" @ "Don't worry about security — each request and every person in our global organization as well as contractors is thoroughly vetted to ensure every element they're permitted to access is justified!" @ "How is HR so spot-on with making sure each person gets the fair review and compensation they deserve?" @ "Why should I be paid extra for being on call when it's nobody's fault but my own if anything goes wrong?" @ "It's incredible how refactoring code makes even the most complex code drop dead simple to understand!" @ "Thankfully office politics plays no role in how decisions are made here!" @ "Isn't it great that we have whole departments whose job is only to tell you what you're doing wrong, not what's right?" @ Just because the most brilliant minds at tech giants can't solve certain problems doesn't mean your team shouldn't be expected to do so during the next sprint!" @ "Even if your CI/CD requirements are impossible, it's my fault if my code and tests can't pass them!" @ "Why shouldn't we be able to come up with precise estimates for incomplete requirements for something that's never been done before without any idea of who's going to be working on it or what technology they'll be using!"

Submission + - Growing Up Ballmer 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Business Insider and others are running tidbits from an interesting conversation with 29-year-old Pete Ballmer (apparently drawn from a Cash Cuties podcast), a standup comedian living in San Francisco and one of the sons of billionaire and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "Up until I was in late elementary school," Ballmer notes, "my understanding was that my family was rich, but I didn't know that we were globally and historically rich. [...] For both my mom and my dad, having a lot of money was a relatively new experience, as was raising children. They raised us in line with how their parents raised them, and since they didn't grow up talking about wealth, they didn't talk about it with us, either."

Interestingly, when Pete finally did get a life-changing windfall, it didn't come from his parents. "After college," Ballmer explains, "I never considered not having a job, so I became a product manager at a game development company [he's a Stanford CS grad]. Then I inherited a sum of money from my grandfather when I turned 25. He had worked his way up to middle management at Ford and put the money he saved into Microsoft stock, which did pretty well and ended up being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time I received it. When I first heard about it, I was a junior in college. My initial reaction was that I would decline it — I was still pretty uncomfortable with my family's wealth and figured I could get a pretty high-paying job in tech and wouldn't need their money. But then I turned 25, and I didn't decline the money; in retrospect, that would have been a very silly decision. I'd also started doing standup comedy in college and continued doing it on the side while I worked. After about four years of working as a product manager, I quit to pursue comedy full-time."

For now, Ballmer is leading a modest life compared to some billionaires' kids ("I live in a two-bed, one-bath apartment") but notes, "As we're all older now, our family has started talking more proactively and intentionally about money. We've talked about what our wills might consist of, what happens to the Clippers — which my dad owns — once my parents have passed, how having the money affects what we choose to do career-wise, how the money has or has not 'corrupted' us, and the wariness we all have around money's general ability to do that to people."

Submission + - Google To 6-Year-Olds: Don't Be a 'Goofus', Get Permission Before Using Content 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Last month, a Google-funded special edition of Highlights for Children based on Google’s Be Internet Awesome curriculum was created and 1.25 million copies of the print magazine were distributed to children, schools, and other organizations as part of a new partnership between Google and Highlights, the children's publication that targets kids aged 6-12.

A Google.org blog post calls out the special issue's Goofus and Gallant cartoon feature in which always-does-the-wrong-thing "Goofus promised Kayden he wouldn't share the silly photo, but he shares it anyway", while always-does-the-right-thing "Gallant asks others if it's OK to share their photos." Also called out is a Don't Fall for Fake puzzle, which Google explains is provided so "kids can learn to discern between what's real and what's fake online."

Submission + - DuckDB Swims Through JSON Data Like a jq Duck, But With SQL

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Among the amazing features of the in-process analytical database DuckDB, writes Paul Gross in DuckDB as the New jq, is that it has many data importers included without requiring extra dependencies. This means it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table, among many other formats. "Once I learned DuckDB could read JSON files directly into memory," Gross explains, "I realized that I could use it for many of the things where I’m currently using jq. In contrast to the complicated and custom jq syntax, I’m very familiar with SQL and use it almost daily."

The stark difference of the two programming approaches to the same problem — terse-but-cryptic jq vs. more-straightforward-to-most SQL — also raises some interesting questions: Will the use of Generative AI coding assistants more firmly entrench the status quo of the existing programming paradigms on whose codebases it's been trained? Or could it help bootstrap the acceptance of new, more approachable programming paradigms? Had something like ChatGPT been around back in the Programming Windows 95 days, might people have been content to use Copilot to generate reams of difficult-to-maintain-and-enhance Windows C code using models trained on the existing codebases instead of exploring easier approaches to Windows programming like Visual BASIC?

Submission + - Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Last year," Ian Bogost writes in Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem, "18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing. Students’ interest in CS is intellectual—culture moves through computation these days—but it is also professional. Young people hope to access the wealth, power, and influence of the technology sector. That ambition has created both enormous administrative strain and a competition for prestige."

"Another approach has gained in popularity," Bogost notes. "Universities are consolidating the formal study of CS into a new administrative structure: the college of computing. [...] When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering. That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large."

Bogost concludes: "I used to think computing education might be stuck in a nesting-doll version of the engineer’s fallacy, in which CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers."

Submission + - Indiana Becomes 9th State to Make CS a High School Graduation Requirement

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Last October, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org publicly called out Indiana in its 2023 State of Computer Science Education report, advising the Hoosier state it needed to heed Code.org's new policy recommendation and "adopt a graduation requirement for all high school students in computer science."

Having already joined 49 other Governors who signed a Code.org-organized compact calling for increased K-12 CS education in his state after coming under pressure from hundreds of the nation's tech, business, and nonprofit leaders, Indiana Governor Eric J. Holcomb apparently didn't need much convincing. "We must prepare our students for a digitally driven world by requiring Computer Science to graduate from high school," Holcomb proclaimed in his January State of the State Address. Two months later — following Microsoft-applauded testimony for legislation to make it so by Code.org partners College Board and Nextech (the Indiana Code.org Regional Partner which is also paid by the Indiana Dept. of Education to prepare educators to teach K-12 CS, including Code.org's curriculum) — Holcomb on Wednesday signed House Bill 1243 into law, making CS a HS graduation requirement. The IndyStar reports students beginning with the Class of 2029 will be required to take a computer science class that must include instruction in algorithms and programming, computing systems, data and analysis, impacts of computing and networks and the internet.

The new law is not Holcomb's first foray into K-12 CS education. Back in 2017, Holcomb and Indiana struck a deal giving Infosys (a big Code.org donor) the largest state incentive package ever — $31M to bring 2,000 tech employees to Central Indiana — that also promised to make Indiana kids more CS savvy through the Infosys Foundation USA, headed at the time by Vandana Sikka, a Code.org Board member and wife of Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka. Following the announcement of the now-stalled deal, Holcomb led a delegation to Silicon Valley where he and Indiana University (IU) President Michael McRobbie joined Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi and Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka on a Thought Leader panel at the Infosys Confluence 2017 conference to discuss Preparing America for Tomorrow. At the accompanying Infosys Crossroads 2017 CS education conference, speakers included Sikka's wife Vandana, McRobbie's wife Laurie Burns McRobbie, Nextech President and co-CEO Karen Jung, Code.org execs, and additional IU educators. Later that year, IU 'First Lady' Laurie Burns McRobbie announced that Indiana would offer the IU Bloomington campus as a venue for Infosys Foundation USA's inaugural Pathfinders Summer Institute, a national event for K-12 teacher education in CS that offered professional development from Code.org and Nextech, as well as an unusual circumvent-your-school's-approval-and-name-your-own-stipend funding arrangement for teachers via an Infosys partnership with the NSF and DonorsChoose that was unveiled at the White House.

And that, Schoolhouse Rock Fans, is one more example of how Microsoft's National Talent Strategy is becoming Code.org-celebrated K-12 CS state laws!

Comment Re:Holy Run On Sentence!! (Score 1) 14

"Last year, three of its board members - V Ravishankar of Sequoia Capital (now Peak XV Partners), Vivian Wu of Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Russell Dreisenstock of Prosus - resigned, leaving just Mr Raveendran, his wife Divya Gokulnath and brother Riju Raveendran on the board."

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