Google funds high school computer learning

Google has announced the funding of 13 universities in Australia to provide training to high school computer science teachers.

…universities develop 2-3 day workshops for local high school and middle school CS teachers. These workshops incorporate informational talks by industry leaders, and discussions on new and emerging CS curricula at the high school and middle school level.

Of course we don’t actually seem to have a computer science curriculum per se and so no designated computer science teachers. Thus the teachers being targeted seem to be in the related fields of science, maths, design and technology and so on.

Locally the Universities involved are Macquarie University, The University of New South Wales and The University of Sydney. From a practical perspective the Universities appear to have been taken a little by surprise by all this. As I write this, Macquarie’s course does not have a confirmed date, UNSW takes you to a broken link and Sydney, which seems the most thought through, has a registration page saying the course (which is in July) has already run.

Any teething problems to one side, this is a great initiative and Google deserves applause for providing the funding to make it happen. Google hopes to:

…reach 1,000 teachers across Australia and New Zealand. Our hope is that these educators will then be able to return to the classroom and help create the next generation of computer scientists, creators and entrepreneurs.

This is a good thing.