Volunteering With TEALS
In February, I read about a volunteer opportunity teaching high school Computer Science on the West Seattle Blog. I had already been thinking about volunteering in general as a way of giving back and getting more involved in the community. Since West Seattle High School is just down the street from our house and I have always wanted to teach, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to both teach a subject I have expertise in and help out in our own neighborhood.
The volunteer program is called TEALS and it was started by an employee at Microsoft in 2009. The aim of the Microsoft TEALS Program is to bring computer science to high schools by pairing volunteer software engineers in industry with full-time classroom teachers.
The statistics on the TEALS website show that there is a huge demand for software engineers that is not being met by our schools. There will be over a million unfilled CS-related positions created over the next 5 years, yet only 1 in 10 schools even offer computer science classes. Meanwhile nearly 15 times as many students took the US History AP exam as the Computer Science exam.
Computer Science was the single most valuable course I took in high school, and the programming languages and internet resources we had access to were pretty primitive back then. In those days we learned Turbo Pascal and the best websites for additional material were early Geocities websites with animated GIFs. Given that the AP class now uses Java as a programming language and students have access to resources like Google, Stack Overflow, and Android smartphones, I bet the students will build some amazing things with a little bit of guidance.
While I don’t have any experience teaching high school students, I am looking forward to the challenge. My only experience teaching is from when I worked at the University of Texas at Austin. While working there, I taught short JavaScript courses to mainframe developers and also wrote some course materials for web developers who wanted to learn PHP. I received some good feedback on those courses, so I’m hoping with some guidance from an experienced full-time teacher I will be able to successfully teach at the high school level and see many students pass the AP test at the end of this experience.
Okay Coder
I will be using this blog to write about my experience teaching computer science and reflect on what I learn. I am also planning to start a YouTube channel where I publish some instructional programming videos that I create. Making these videos will help me practice teaching at home and will help a different audience learn how to program simultaneously.
I will build a website at okaycoder.com (coming soon) where I publish the videos, link to articles here, and maintain a twitter and instagram account if it makes sense. I am also planning to take a few professional development courses through the University of Washington to learn Android Development and sharpen my Java and mobile skills.
That’s all for now. I suppose I should wait until I hear back from TEALS before I get too excited. I am still in the application and interview phase right now, but I will write more as events unfold.
