One of my passion projects is volunteering at area schools with the goal of providing mentorship to kids who are interested in coding.  [Flashback]  I learned to code when I was 12 years old – BASIC programming language, then assembly language on those old Z80 microprocessors (the same instruction set that evolved into todays Intel processors).  Sorry for the history lesson, but the point is that I was lucky to have an engineer in my family to provide the hardware, guidance and opportunity to learn this stuff.  I am a strong advocate of providing young people with every opportunity possible to explore and learn beyond what is in the standard classroom curriculum.

This brings me to the next point: we don’t have enough technology professionals in the marketplace.  I’ve been a hiring manager for many years and I’ve personally seen the “street” empty out.  Recruiting has turned into an exercise in “poaching” from other companies.  This is generally good for job seekers, but bad for businesses and bad for our country if we want to be the technology leader for the next 100 years.

Why?  It seems than coding isn’t that cool.  If you talk to most kids in high school, they will tell you that coding isn’t easy or if they were to learn coding, they would want to make video games or software for drones (thanks Amazon, really?).  I am of the belief that coding has never been easier.  Punch cards anyone?  So what is happening with this kids back home?  As a life-long resident of the sunshine state, I’ve seen our education system go from worst to better, to worst again, and better, etc.  Well, you know it’s Florida and the grandkids live somewhere north of the Smoky Mountains.  Education has never been a priority here.

What do we do? Align with companies who employ technology professionals and have forward thinking strategy (more than 18 months).  They can help provide young people with the opportunities to learn technology through mentorships.  In Tampa Bay we have programs such as Code Club and STEM.  We use fantastic tools from Code.org to teach 4th and 5th grade students basic programming logic, structures and graphics.  The tools are there, we need people to get involved.  We need to provide young people a chance to learn technology, especially in Computer Science.

To help drive this point home, we gathered a sample data set from CollegeBoard.org of AP test scores in Florida from 2010 to 2013.  Using Tableau, we published a very simple interactive visualization on Tableau Public which demonstrates how we have been underachieving in terms of Computer Science education.  Take a look for yourself, change the filters across course categories and compare the test scores.  We need to do more, a lot more.  Who’s in?