Steal This Idea — A fully online computer science high school

Watching the progress of Lambda School over the past year has been stunning. There is such demand across all geographies and demographics to learn computer science. It is as if someone has held out their hand with the keys to the kingdom and there is a frenzy to grab them.

One sector where there is a lot of demand is high school students. This may seem counter-intuitive, because the whole idea of high school is a good general education that prepares you for college or work. But as a part of two teenagers, what I can say is that for many students high school is soul-crushing. Think back to your experience. You likely had a couple of subjects you didn’t really like and you were forced to take those for four years straight! For me, it was history. In later life, I’ve become a huge reader of history, but that was just not the right time in my life to think about what happened hundreds of years ago.

Enter computer science. A large number of kids know they want to be a techie pretty early in life. For me, it was middle school when I started programming. From that point on, I dropped almost every outside activity and only went to school because I was forced. Every other waking moment was with my computer and my friends who also loved computers. Part of me has that old slogan ‘You need to do these generalist things because they are good for you’ in the back of my head, but I’ve increasingly come to reject that. In fact, I think doing a series of things you love, when you love them, is a life well lived. Teenagers embody that feeling. Life feels too short for the monotony and when they find something they love (Fortnite :), they do it obsessively.

So I think a full-time computer science high school is a good idea. The closest thing I have seen is the Proof school in San Francisco, focused on math and computers. Could you build a Lambda-like high school specifically for high schoolers that created the kind of culture that would motivate students and help them with all of the crises they go through? It would be cool if you could.