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Amazon Pumping $50 Million into CS Education

Amazon is committing $50 million to computer science education in the United States with new programs supporting high school and early undergraduate students, including financial aid to help schools bring AP CS courses to their students.

As part of the new Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) Pathway, Amazon will support schools and individual students needing access to Advanced Placement courses in CS. For the AP courses, Amazon's AWS Educate is partnering with Edhesive to provide access to the AP CS Java and AP CS Principles courses. (AP CS Principles has proved to be the most successful AP course launch to date.) Teachers, administrators and students themselves can apply to bring the courses to their schools. Amazon will then, according to the company, "select the eligible schools and students who will receive financial aid to access the Edhesive AP courses. Edhesive will engage with the selected schools and students in the spring of 2018 to onboard and launch for the fall 2018 school year."

AWS Educate is a global service from Amazon that provides students and faculty with access to cloud-related learning resources. For students, it provides training, hands-on experiences and career resources. For faculty, it offers open source content, training resources and community support.

Edhesive provides complete courses to schools, including teacher training, curriculum, resources and support.

Applications for the CS courses are being accepted through June.

Amazon is also providing support to students pursuing or looking to pursue computer science degrees. Those who pass the AP CS courses offered by Edhesive and who maintain a 3.0 GPA will be able to apply for $10,000 college scholarships. (The scholarships are aimed at "communities currently underrepresented in tech.") Applications will open Nov. 1, 2018 and close Jan. 15, 2019.

College and university freshmen and sophomores can also apply to intern at Amazon. This year's application process will open Sept. 1 and close Dec. 1.

Further information can be found in Amazon's blog post from this morning.

About the Author

David Nagel is the former editorial director of 1105 Media's Education Group and editor-in-chief of THE Journal, STEAM Universe, and Spaces4Learning. A 30-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art, marketing, media, and business publications.

He can be reached at [email protected]. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrnagel/ .


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