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AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing unit, today announced the Education Equity Initiative, which aims to provide “educational institutions with the technologies needed to build digital educational innovations for underrepresented communities.” AWS is committing $100 million in cloud credits to this effort over the next five years.
Tom Perry, who leads education work within the Social Impact and Responsibility team at AWS, told me that this initiative represents a bit of a departure from the way the company traditionally thinks about these projects. Typically, these programs have focused on building projects that directly train teachers and children.
“We now realize from learning from this work — work we’ve done with Code.org and others for a while — that the people who are best positioned to impact underserved community learners are those organizations that are building experiences there,” Berry said.
The plan aims to support hundreds of non-profit organizations globally over the next five years and help them build the tools necessary to teach their local communities programming and other computer-related skills. If necessary, AWS will also provide hands-on assistance in building and scaling the applications these organizations will create.
The team has already conducted a pilot with 50 organizations from 10 different countries. For example, Rocket Learning, an India-based nonprofit that works to improve access to quality early childhood education for underserved children, uses Amazon Q in AWS Quicksight to build tools that allow it to evaluate the effectiveness of the content you build.
Code.org, a popular nonprofit dedicated to providing computer science education to K-12 schools, is another early partner (and a long-time partner of Amazon on similar educational initiatives). Code.org has rolled out a new tool for computer science teachers as part of this program that is essentially an AI teaching assistant.
“The pain point and problem in computer science education that we see on the teaching side is that many teachers are new to computer science. They didn’t have a computer science education during their undergraduate studies,” Karim Mejji, chief product officer at Code.org, told me. They don’t have confidence. They’re looking at projects in some of our curriculum, which is project-based learning. They look at these projects and we want the students to bring their own kind of identity and expression to the project. But here the teacher says: You got this title. I got 20 of these projects. What am I going to do with this?”
The new initiative will run in parallel with Amazon’s existing programs like its own Future engineer Program and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Scholarship program.
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