From the email inbox of a reader-parent….
Meany Middle School was invited to an amazing opportunity at Microsoft on Thursday, October 3rd from 9 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. This event is in partnership with Paramount Picture. The students will have an opportunity to experience a coding class with a surprise special guest.
There is space for 45 – 8th grade students who identify as female. The students must be 13 yrs. old to attend this field trip. Lunch will be provided. It has been described as a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Only the first 45 students who return the permission slips and photo release form will be allowed to attend. Permission slips were sent home with students yesterday.
If Microsoft chooses to expose these young folks to C++, it would be interesting to know how many decide that coding is the best career choice.
What a great opportunity
It’s all abt exposure
Hope they offer n other states
It is about exposure. Major silicon valley companies do the same (my employer is one of them), in an effort to get more young girls excited about coding.
If you notice, you must sign a photo release to join. Microsoft isn’t doing this for their health.
Sure but this doesn’t take away from the outcome. If you’re going to spend energy on shaping career choices of teenagers, it makes the most sense to focus on exposing demographics that -for whatever reason- choose other professions.
Can’t imagine Microsoft inspiring anyone to program. The most inspiration was peeking & poking addresses to see the screen change. Now, it’s all about making 2 for the Soft, the Goog, or the Apple & 1 for you.
It must be 90% about visual studio & hardly any actual programming. It’s terrible how dominant visual studio has become in embedded systems. After several days of downloading terrabytes of addons, filling out license forms, creating passwords, waiting for confirmation emails, you’ll eventually get that Renesas chip to print hello world & your source code won’t compile on anything else but the proprietary windows compiler. What was this post about?
Visual Studio Code is free and supports lots of languages ( and is cross-platform ). If some hardware provider is exclusively reliant on MS, that is hardly their fault.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/04/these-are-the-15-best-u-s-tech-companies-to-work-for-in-2019-according-to-glassdoor/ – Microsoft one of the best tech companies to work, tied with Google on rating. It s easier to port MS software to Linux or Apple than vice versa. What did you try to do in VS? You do not have to use VS for Windows development.
Can they code?
(NB. This was a reply to spam that was since deleted.)
Can I join the class if I identify myself as 13 yrs 8th grade female student?