Next Wednesday night, at Civic Hall in New York City at 6:30pm, CSNYC will celebrate its second anniversary. For those that don’t know, CSNYC is a non-profit dedicated to the idea that every child who goes through the NYC public school system should encounter computer science along the way, in elementary school, in middle school, and in high school, and those that want to do a deep exploration of computer science should be able to do that before they graduate high school. The idea is not to turn every student into a software engineer, although it would be good if a bunch of students decided to do that. The idea is that every career will require a working knowledge of coding in the world we are heading into and that we ought to make sure our children have that.
In two years, we have increased our school coverage from one to over 120 schools. We are very proud of that accomplishment and will be showcasing those schools, the programs that are in them, and the students who are benefiting from this effort next Wednesday night. This event is also a fundraiser since we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. Though we are in 120 schools, there are 1700 in the NYC public school system. At its core, CSNYC is funding teacher training and development. The only scalable way to get all children to learn computer science is to train the best teachers out there how to teach computer science. I figure it will require somewhere between 3500 and 4000 teachers trained in teaching computer science in order to reach all 1700 schools in NYC and achieve our goals. That will require a fair bit of money.
If you would like to attend CSNYC at Two next wednesday night, go here and RSVP. Individual tickets are $250. But if you have the means, you could also buy a $1000 ticket that is for two guests, or a table for $10,000, $25,000, or $50,000.
It’s going to be fun, optimistic, and exciting evening. I hope to see some of you there.
