Musings of a VC in NYC

Teach Computer Science To Kids On Your Way To Work

A few months ago, I read about this amazing program called TEALS that allows software engineers to stop by a local school on their way to work and teach computer science to high school students. I thought "what an amazing idea".

Fast forward and I am happy to tell you that TEALS is coming to NYC this fall. About a dozen public high schools in NYC have expressed interest and the final group of participating schools will be nailed down in the next few weeks.

The way this works is a software engineer literally stops by the school on his or her way to work, teaches the class in partnership with one of the existing teachers in the school, and is out the door on the way to work before any of his or her colleagues is out of bed. The TEALS program teaches two classes, an Intro To CS class based on the Berkeley curriculum, and an AP CS class based on the University of Washington curriculum. Software engineers who choose to participate get trained during the summer to teach one or both, and then they teach up to a few days a week on the way to work.

THE ASK: We need to recruit up to 50 software engineers here in NYC to make this a reality. The first info session is next Monday, March 4th, at 6pm. It will be held at the Microsoft office in midtown. If you would like to attend, let us know, and we will put you on the RSVP list.

There will be a second info session at USV on March 20th at 6pm and Kevin Wang, founder of TEALS, will be talking at the NY Tech Meetup on the evening of March 19th as well. So if you can't make next monday evening, there will be a few more chances to learn about this amazing program.

In other "CS in NYC schools" news, the the Dept of Education is rolling out a CS curriculum in 20 middle schools and high schools this fall. The Mayor will announce the 20 schools that are getting this CS curriculum today. There will be participating schools in all 5 boroughs. Approximately 50 students per school will participate, so this program will reach around 1,000 students, starting this fall. 

And there are a number of other interesting programs bubbling up all around the city which I can't or shouldn't talk about yet. All of this happening in addition to the dedicated school model (AFSE) that I have written about a few times here at AVC. This is all a reflection of the dedication of folks in City Hall and the DOE to bring more CS opportunities to our kids here in NYC. It's a fantastic thing and I am very excited by all of this.

NOTE: MBA Mondays is taking a break, probably for just this monday, but it could be a bit longer. I need to figure out where to go next.

Video Of The Week: Going To The Blackboard To Talk About Online Higher Education

A few weeks ago, I went down to Wharton, where I got an MBA in the mid 80s, to talk about "being contrarian". My experience with MBAs tells me that they need to be encouraged to think outside of the box and that's what I went down there to evangelize.

During the Q&A, which was excellent, way better than the talk itself, I got a question about higher education. Specifically, I was asked what I would do about the "threat" of online education if I ran Wharton. 

I went to the blackboard, got some chalk, and laid out something that has been rattling around in my mind for the better part of the past few years. I think it is the first time I have laid out this vision in its entirety. The whole thing lasted less than five minutes and it was videotaped so I am making the "chalk talk" my video of the week.

Sadly, the camera was fixed on a tripod so the blackboard itself is not caught in the video. The folks who ran the event and filmed it managed to embed a still of the blackboard in its final incarnation in the upper left of this video so you can get a feel for what I was drawing as I was talking.

I think all institutions of higher education need to adopt the trifecta model which is MOOC, blended, traditional, if they want to remain vital in the coming years.

What Is The Net Native Model?

My partner Brad is fond of reminding us at USV that taking the offline model for something and porting it to the web is not often the best way to build a business online.

John Markoff's piece in the New York Times on online education got me thinking about that this morning. MOOCs are all the rage in the online ed world these days. And most of the MOOCs I have used remind me a lot of the traditional classroom model of teaching. The question I am noodling is if there is a better way to teach when you have tens of thousands of people wanting to learn something that you can teach them.

John contrasts the MOOC model to our portfolio company DuoLingo in his piece. He says:

there are early indications that the high interactivity and personalized feedback of online education might ultimately offer a learning structure that can’t be matched by the traditional classroom.

Although DuoLingo was built by one of the most popular teachers at Carnegie Mellon, there are no teachers in their learning model. It's all software, content, and users. Now maybe language learning is easier to teach this way than other things. I don't have a fully formed opinion on this. I am just thinking outloud.

But what we have seen over and over again is that taking a model that was optimized for the analog world and porting it to the internet is almost always suboptimal. And that the person or team that finds the optimal model for the internet is almost always the one who ends up with the big win.

And I think that will be true in education as well.

MBA Everydays

Tom Eisenmann is a professor at Harvard Business School. He published this "best of the startup blog posts of 2012" the other day. Go take a look at it. It was a revelation to me when I saw it yesterday. I tweeted it out right away.

We are witnessing an important change in education. The practicioners are creating curriculum that the schools are leveraging. But more importantly, everyone is leveraging it.

Hacking education indeed.

Fun Friday: Doing Good

Tyrone suggested this fun friday theme to me. He was inspired by Scott Harrison's talk at LeWeb.

The question in Tyrone's words is "what is everyone doing this Holiday for someone else, probably best if its not family or friends. Just helping out someone in need."

These fun fridays always start with me weighing in on the topic. So the thing I care most about right now is doing what I can to change education in our city, our country, and our world. The Gotham Gal and I have a bunch of initiatives going on that front.

When I think about helping someone in need, this chinese proverb comes to mind:

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. 

Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime

So my favorite form of giving back is to do for others what society did for me. Which is giving them the skills to succeed and build a rich and fullfilling life for themselves and their loved ones.

Now it is your turn.

Museum Of Math

Last night the Gotham Gal and I were out and about town attending some holiday parties. One of them was on 26th street, on the north side of Madison Square Park. As we arrived at the building we were headed to, I saw this:

Somehow I had missed the news. The Museum of Mathematics has opened in NYC on the north side of Madison Square Park.

We did not go in. The museum had closed by the time we were there. I am eager to return and check it out. I am and have always been a math geek. And I love teaching math to my kids and anyone who will listen. It is magical stuff when you understand it.

I am so happy we have a place where we can take kids in NYC, either on field trips or family outings, to get them into math and all that it can lead to in their lives. Here's a short photo tour that gives a glimpse of what it is like.

Update:

Jason sent me this video. I am adding it to this post.

Related articles

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Museum of Math: Photo Tour

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CSEdWeek

Folks in the AVC community are well aware of my passion and energy for bringing programming education and curriculum into our classrooms, both at the K12 and Higher Education levels. I feel like good things are starting to happen but we need to do so much more. We are not aligning the needs of the 21st century workforce with the skills we are teaching in our classrooms and that is a big mistake.

Congress has endorsed the week containing December 9th as Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) to recognize the critical role of computing in today’s society and the imperative to bolster computer science education at all levels. I am involved in some local efforts in NYC around CSEdWeek and I would like to highlight it to all of you because it is coming up.

The CSEdWeek website has resources for all the key consituents in this effort. Look for the box on the website that looks like this:

You can also sign the pledge for CSEdWeek. I just did that.

But most importantly, you can celebrate CSEdWeek in your school, your community, your company, and anywhere else you think it is relevant. This is at its core a movement by regular people trying to stimulate change in our education systems and help them make needed changes.

My partner Albert posted yesterday about what he is doing in his kids' school. It is efforts like that, which many of you have also taken on, that will bring the change we need. And that is what CSEdWeek is all about.

Related articles

Please pledge for CSEdWeek 2012 - whenever your event occurs

Are You Ready for Computer Science Education Week?

AFSE Open House This Morning

I am not doing a regular post today because I am spending the morning helping to recruit eighth graders to attend The Academy for Software Engineering next fall

This is our second class for AFSE and this year we get to recruit in the fall alongside all the other high schools. Plus we get to do the open houses in our own school, which did not exist last year.

It is a great feeling to see an idea turn into a reality and then grow from there.

Four "Appearances" In One Day

A few weeks ago Gillian, who keeps me on schedule and a lot more, said to me, "there's a day coming up when you are going to do four appearances in one day." I thought to myself that was a bit much but didn't do anything about it.

Yesterday was that day. I gave talks at Baruch College, Google Hangouts/YouTube, Skyped into an entrepreneurs meetup in Milan Italy, and ended the day talking to the Kauffman Fellows Program at the Alexandria Center in NYC.

The thing I learned yesterday is that sitting at my desk and talking to folks around the world, via the power of Google Hangouts and Skype, is an amazing thing. Of course I've been using these tools for a long time. But yesterday was still a bit of a wakeup call for me.

The Google Hangouts/YouTube thing was a MOOC called Entrepreneurship in Education that is being taught by David Wiley, Todd Manwaring, and Richard Culatta. It was an hour long back and forth on the issues around entrepreneurship in online education. Ki Mae Heussner posted about the class on GigaOm yesterday. Here's the video of the conversation.

The really awesome part of this class is the way that Google Hangouts allows you to have a small interactive group talking about things that is then broadcast to a much larger group. I am going to try to replicate that in my final Office Hours next monday in my Skillshare class.

The Skype into the meetup in Milan was equally awesome. I don't have the video of that to share but here's a twitpic that I saw on Twitter after my talk that gives you a sense of how the folks in Milan experienced it:

As much as I enjoyed the talks I gave at Baruch and the Kauffman event, it was the talks that were delivered online that excite me more. Because online video allows me to talk to folks around the world. And I think that takes the conversations I want to have to a much broader audience and hopefully helps people all around the world think differently and ultimately act differently as they bring their ideas to market.

Seth Godin On Education

I've got a ton going on but nothing to say about it today. So instead of a daily post, I am going to share a video with you that has been suggested to me by a few of you in the community and a bunch more over email this past week.

It's Seth Godin talking about education and what we need to do about it. I watched it this morning and hopefully you can too. It's 16 minutes long.