AWS, Amazon's cloud computing division, today announced the Education Equity Initiative, which aims to “empower educational institutions with technology to build digital learning innovations for underrepresented communities.” AWS is committing $100 million in cloud credits to this effort over the next five years.
Tom Berry, who leads education efforts within AWS' social impact and responsibility team, told me that this initiative is a bit different from how the company has traditionally thought about these projects. Typically, these programs focus on building projects that directly train teachers and children.
“We are learning from that work (which we have been doing with Code.org and others for some time) that who is best positioned to impact learners in underserved communities. , we now realize that this is an organization that is building experiences there,” Berry said.
Image credit: AWS
The plan is to support hundreds of nonprofits around the world over the next five years, helping them build tools to teach coding and other computer-related skills to local communities. When needed, AWS also provides hands-on assistance with building and scaling the applications these organizations build.
The team is already conducting pilots with 50 organizations in 10 countries. For example, India-based nonprofit Rocket Learning is improving access to high-quality early childhood education for underserved children using Amazon Q on AWS Quicksight. We're building tools that allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of the content you're building.
Code.org, a renowned nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing computer science education to K-12 schools, is another early partner (and a long-time partner of Amazon in similar education initiatives). As part of this program, Code.org has rolled out a new tool for computer science teachers that is essentially an AI teaching assistant.
“The difficulty and problem in computer science education from our point of view as a teacher is that many teachers are new to computer science. They didn't have any computer science education in college,” said Code. org Chief Product Officer Karim Meghji told me. “They're not confident. They're focusing on projects in parts of the curriculum that are project-based learning. They're focusing on these projects, and we're giving students a unique sense of identity and expression. But now the teacher says, “I understand this rubric.'' I received 20 of these projects. What are you going to do with this? ”
This new initiative will run alongside Amazon's existing programs such as the Future Engineer program and the AI and ML Scholarship Program.