The AVC community hasn't done a DonorsChoose campaign since the Gotham Gal and I turned 50 and we raised something like $56k in the summer of 2011. I've been looking for a way to beat that and it has not been easy. That's a ton of money to raise in a month on a blog and hard to beat.
But the folks at DonorsChoose and I have come up with something awesome and I am excited to launch it today. For the next month we will be raising money for classrooms in schools that are helping their students learn to code.
Here's how it works. As you all know, I have been very involved in getting CS education into the NYC public school system. It all started with my relationship with Mike Zamansky at Stuyvesant High School which is documented in this NY Times piece. Stuyvesant has been helping their students learn to code for the past 15 years but they were almost alone in that effort.
Because of the efforts of the NYC Dept of Education and folks at City Hall, this coming school year there will be at least 30 high schools and middle schools in NYC joining Stuyvesant on the list of schools that are helping their students learn to code.
And I want to celebrate that. Here's how we are going to do it. We have a list of all the schools in NYC that are helping their students learn to code, including Stuyvestant, AFSE, and all the schools who are launching programs in the fall of this year. Any teacher in any of those schools (not just CS teachers) who has a DonorsChoose campaign going on is automatically on my giving page. We are going to bring good things to the schools that are bringing good things to their students. Good things will come to those who code. Maybe this will get the Principals to wake up and smell the coffee.
Finally, all of you are encouraged to tell us about schools in other parts of the country that are helping their students learn to code. Please leave the details in the comments to this post. The DonorsChoose folks will be combing the comments for additional schools to add to the list.
Of course, we want to bring a lot of funding to these schools and these classrooms. This community has been awesome at doing that and I am confident that all of you will continue to show tremendous generosity. I want to thank all of you in advance for that.
I will kick off this campaign with a donation to my friend Leigh Ann's Finch Robot campaign at the Academy For Software Engineering. The giving page for this campaign is here. And you will all notice the widget on the right rail. As my son Josh would say "let's go!"
