The Future of Work: Will Our Children Be Prepared?

Jeff Sacks - Smart machines and the future of jobs

Smart machines

and the future of jobs

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Since the early 1800s, several waves of technological change have transformed how we work and live. Each new technological marvel — the steam engine, railroad, ocean steamship, telegraph, harvester, automobile, radio, airplane, TV, computer, satellite, mobile phone, and now the Internet — has changed our home lives, communities, workplaces, schools, and leisure time. For two centuries we’ve asked whether ever-more-powerful machines would free us from drudgery or would instead enslave us.

 The question is becoming urgent. IBM’s Deep Blue and other chess-playing computers now routinely beat the world’s chess champions. Google’s DeepMind defeated the European Go champion late last year. IBM’s Watson has gone from becoming the world’s “Jeopardy’’ champion to becoming an expert medical diagnostician. Self-driving cars on the streets of Pittsburgh are on the verge of displacing Uber drivers. And Baxter, the industrial robot, is carrying out an expanding range of assembly-line and warehouse operations. Will the coming generations of smart machines deliver us leisure and well-being or joblessness and falling wages?

 The answer to this question is not simple. There is neither a consensus nor deep understanding of the future of jobs in an economy increasingly built on smart machines. The machines have gotten much smarter so fast that their implications for the future of work, home life, schooling, and leisure are a matter of open speculation.

 We need to pursue policies so that the coming generation of smart machines works for us, and our well-being, rather than humanity working for the machines and the few who control their operating systems.

 In a way, the economic effects of smarter machines are akin to the economic effects of international trade. Trade expands the nation’s economic pie but also changes how the pie is divided. Smart machines do the same. In the past, smarter machines have expanded the economic pie and shifted jobs and earnings away from low-skilled workers to high-skilled workers. In the future, robots and artificial intelligence are likely to shift national income from all types of workers toward capitalists and from the young to the old.

 CONSIDER ENGLAND’S Industrial Revolution in the first part of the 19th century, when James Watt’s steam engine, the mechanization of textile production, and the railroad created the first industrial society. No doubt the economic pie expanded remarkably. England’s national income roughly doubled from 1820 to 1860. Yet traditional weavers were thrown out of their jobs; the Luddites, an early movement of English workers, tried to smash the machines that were impoverishing them; and poet William Blake wrote of the “dark Satanic mills’’ of the new industrial society. An enlarging economic pie, yes; a new prosperity shared by all, decidedly not.

 Looking back at two centuries of more and more powerful machines (and the accompanying technologies and systems to operate them), we can see one overarching truth: Technological advances made the society much richer but also continually reshuffled the winners and losers. Similarly, one overarching pattern was repeatedly replayed. The march of technology has favored those with more education and training. Smart machines require well-trained specialists to operate them. An expanded economic pie favors those with managerial and professional skills who can navigate the complexities of finance, administration, management, and technological systems.

 Overall, better machines caused national income to soar and the man-hours spent in hard physical labor to decline markedly. Seventy-hour workweeks in 1870 have become 35-hour workweeks today. An average of around six years of schooling has become an average of 17 years. With increasing longevity, most workers can now look forward to a decade or more of retirement years, an idea simply unimaginable in the late 19th century. It’s amazing to reflect that for Americans 15 years and over, the average time at work each day is now just 3 hours 11 minutes. Those at work average 7 hours and 34 minutes, but only 42.1 percent of Americans 15 and over are at work on an average day. The rest of the time, other than sleep and personal care, is taken up with schooling, retirement, caring for children, leisure and sports, shopping, and household activities.

 Smart machines in the 19th century provided massive power (the steam engine), transport (rail, steamships, automobiles), information (telegraph), and material transformation (steel and textile mills), and also, crucially, a more and more powerful substitute for human brawn – that is, backbreaking physical labor — on the farm and in the mines. Seed drills, cotton gins, threshers, reapers, combined harvesters, and by the early 20th century, tractors, not only opened up vast new farmlands but also replaced millions of farm workers by machines. Mechanical cotton pickers in the early decades of the 20th century displaced millions of African-American sharecroppers on Southern farms and contributed to the great African-American migration to northern cities.

 Hard physical labor declined as machines did more and more of this work; but so too did jobs and earnings for lower-skilled workers. Those lucky to get an education could obtain the higher skills needed for the new jobs. Those who could not suffered stagnant or falling wages and a further loss of social status. In the past two decades, more and more low-skilled men have simply dropped out of the labor force entirely.

 The most important policy response is to ensure that students stay in school long enough to achieve the skills they need for the new and better jobs. As long as the national supply of skilled workers roughly keeps pace with the rising demand for skilled workers, while the supply of low-skilled workers declines in line with the decline in the numbers of low-skilled jobs, the gap in earnings between high- and low-skilled workers remains relatively stable. In this way, the rising school attainments of Americans during the 20th century roughly maintained a balance with the shift from low-skilled work to high-skilled work.

 Yet after around 1980, the earnings of highly educated workers (notably, those with bachelor’s degrees and higher) increased sharply relative to less-educated workers (those with high-school diplomas or less). Greater international trade and offshoring probably had a role in this, and so did technology, with smarter machines replacing high-school-educated workers in a widening range of manual and repetitive tasks. The shift of the labor force toward higher-skilled workers wasn’t fast enough in recent decades. Many American lower-skilled workers have been hit hard by lost jobs and falling wages.

 YET TODAY’S smart machines now are not just replacing brawn but also brains. The futurist Ray Kurzweil and others have popularized the term “singularity’’ to mean a time in the near future when machines are simply better than humans at just about everything: moving, assembling, driving, writing, calculating, war-making, teaching (yikes!), and the rest.

 Several recent studies, including at Oxford University and McKinsey, have tried to estimate the share of jobs that are likely to be up for grabs by smart machines in the next 20 or so years. Each occupation is analyzed for the kinds of tasks needed. Are they highly repetitive or highly context-specific? Do they require highly specialized mechanical skills, a high degree of interaction with others, or a high measure of emotional empathy? And so on. From this categorization of job tasks, the researchers estimate the share of jobs that can be substituted by robots and artificial intelligence systems. Their answer: Roughly half of today’s jobs are susceptible to at least some kinds of replacement by smart machines.

 The implications are a bit tricky. On the one hand, smarter machines mean more economic output and, in principle, a larger economic pie to share among the American people. Investing in machines, or in the companies that produce the smart systems that run them, would seem to offer high returns; capital owners would be very likely to benefit. On the other hand, smarter machines could mean a decline in the demand for workers. Young people with labor to sell but little wealth to invest could find themselves on the short end of the economic stick, with lower wages and no grand prospect of benefiting from the higher returns to capital. Older and richer Americans would tend to benefit, younger and poorer Americans would tend to fall behind.

 This would not be the end of the story, however. If today’s young people find themselves without jobs, they not only will be poorer, but will also save less as a result of shrunken incomes. Yes, the smarter machines will offer a higher return to saving, but the supply of national saving will shrink. A careful theoretical analysis reveals a stark truth: Smart machines could actually set in motion a downward spiral, wherein today’s young workers can’t find decent jobs, and thereby cut back on their saving, which in turn leaves the following generation of young workers even worse off.

 This is indeed a frightening vision. And yet the same analysis suggests a way out. If the rich capital owners transfer some of their windfall profits to the struggling young workers, then both the old rich and the young poor would be better off with the smart machines than without them. In effect, the rich older shareholders would compensate the poor younger workers in order to offset the fall in wages.

 There are two ways this “offset’’ could happen. Within families, parents could transfer some of their increased wealth to their children; but alas, that is a solution that is likely to be relevant mainly for richer households.

 For the non-rich, the real solution could and should be achieved through fiscal policy. Rich older shareholders should be taxed in order to make transfer payments to the poorer, young workers.

 Such transfer payments could be carried out in many ways: a cut in payroll taxes; tuition-free higher education; an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low-wage workers; or a “reverse’’ Social Security system with payments from the old to the young. One policy that has been suggested is a capital grant to every newborn, financed by a wealth tax. In essence, each newborn would receive a robot (or financial claim to one) at birth.

 THE NEW AGE of smart machines has already seen a shift in national income away from wages and toward profits. In automobile manufacturing, for example, where robots have already displaced many assembly-line workers, the share of wage compensation in the industry’s value-added has tumbled from 57 percent in 1997 to 47 percent in 2014. For the economy as a whole, a recent study reports a decline in the labor share of national income from around 68 percent in 1947 to 60 percent in 2013. The shift toward capital income seems to be well underway, and would seem to be a key factor in America’s sharply higher inequality of income. As machines become even smarter in future years, the economy-wide shift from wage income to profit income is likely to continue.

 In addition to income redistribution from capital owners to workers (and from old to young) there are three other steps we should plan to take.

 First, as old jobs disappear and new ones are created, we should emulate Germany’s successful apprenticeship programs, which train young workers in the skills needed in the economy. The President’s Council of Economic Advisers has rightly emphasized the need for scaling up this kind of active training.

 Second, we should prepare for a workforce in which workers will change jobs with much greater frequency than in the past. In an age of disruptive technology, we should plan for disruption. Changing jobs should be regarded as normal; training and skill upgrading should be life long, and health care and other benefits should follow workers, not jobs.

 Third, and finally, let us remember that ever-smarter machines could enable us to enjoy much more leisure time, and more hours of the day at valuable but nonremunerated activities and volunteer work.

 Suppose that singularity indeed arrives, so that robots and expert systems really do perform all the unpleasant and humdrum work of the economy. As long as fiscal policies ensure that everybody, young and old, can share in the bounty, the results could be a 21st-century society in which we have much more time — and take more time — to learn, study, create, innovate, and enjoy and protect nature and each other.

 Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and author of “The Age of Sustainable Development.’’  

Projected Average Salary by Discipline (STEM vs Humanities

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/business/a-rising-call-to-promote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html?_r=1

MA EdTech Next Growth Sector?

Will education technology be the next growth sector?

By Eileen Rudden

Katherine Taylor for The Boston Globe/file 2014

Beyza Boyacioglu videotaped a conversation between Harvard University Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (left) and Christina Hodge of the Peabody Museum for a massive open online course, or MOOC.

Massachusetts’ innovation economy is a well-recognized engine for economic growth in the Commonwealth. Its higher ed sector is world renowned, and its K-12 school system leads the United States in student outcomes. Education curriculum and program developers have long thrived here.

Now the education technology ecosystem is growing from the convergence of these unique Massachusetts’ strengths. It has the potential to provide major growth in jobs to the Commonwealth, and new time-saving or quality-enhancing products and services for learners.

The “ecosystem” is home to more than 250 early stage startups, several dozen venture-funded companies and dozens of growth stage companies, many private. The companies range from Doink, an app that students use to create their own videos using green screens, to Listen Current, which provides NPR content and lesson plans to teachers and students. They range from EverTrue, enabling colleges to connect with alumni over social media, to QStream, which was developed at Harvard Medical School and can be used to train sales forces on new products. New educational programs range from the Startup Institute, a post graduate program to transition college graduates to roles in the startup sector, to edX, with the potential to transform higher education.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has long been headquartered here in Boston, Cengage recently moved its corporate headquarters here, and McGraw Hill has opened up its R&D here. Scholastic’s development site is here. Pearson and MacMillan both have major operations here. Our education nonprofit sector has been exporting curriculum and instructional approaches for some time, whether it is from the Museum of Science, FIRST, Facing History and Ourselves or YearUp. Google in Cambridge is the headquarters for Google PlayEdu; Amazon acquired local company TenMarks, and Microsoft is making a renewed push in education.

The industry has been growing here, fueled by our world class university faculty and students, and supported by the strong K-12 educators. Many of them recognize the possibility to improve education using this new generation of digital tools and approaches. They are “practice- innovators,” eager to improve student learning, enhance their roles as educators and save time and money. Just as the life sciences boom was fueled by universities and early adopting hospital and medical provider systems, edtech will need support from early adopter educators.

The sector is promising. What does it need to grow even faster? So far, the support of this sector has been privately funded, with local tech leaders founding LearnLaunch. We are serving as a connector, bringing support and services to the participants. Here are my personal recommendations based on two years working with the education technology innovators.

• Support should come from the Commonwealth economic development agencies, such as the Economic Development Office. A grant to measure the sector’s current size, potential growth rate, and key bottlenecks to growth would be a great start.

• The Executive Office of Education could convene educators and entrepreneurs interested in more formalized collaborations between colleges, schools and innovators. This action would broaden recognition of the possibilities for this sector, and help create a broader community of practice.

• The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education should support the development of personalized learning by encouraging schools and districts that pioneer “blended learning.” Rhode Island created a challenge competition for schools to introduce “personalized pathways” and has now inaugurated the FuseRI initiative in blended learning. The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, in its “New Opportunity to Lead” report, recommends the creation of a Learning Redesign Challenge, to encourage the development of school models that change use of time and staff to personalize learning.

• Massachusetts schools must upgrade their school tech infrastructure. The Legislature helped by passing a $38 million matching grant bill in August to help K-12 schools build the wireless infrastructure needed to support student and teacher use of edtech tools which improve student engagement and achievement. Local schools should move forward, and the state should plan its next support initiative.

• Industry collaboration to raise our profile. All technology businesses are competing for talent. The converged content and technology companies want to attract more engineers, instructional designers, and experienced sales people to the field. We need to showcase the excitement of our industry. Edtech companies are mission driven: they want to improve student learning. They offer growing businesses to fuel careers and to improve educational outcomes.

• Investment for early stage companies. Local investors are increasingly looking at and investing in edtech. Investors have most interest in higher education and direct to consumer offerings. While we have great examples of startups like Panorama moving to Boston, promising companies which don’t find investment move elsewhere. Should there be a fund recognizing the interplay between investment and economic development, like exists in Maryland?

• We should build a broad coalition to address this opportunity for Massachusetts, to improve student achievement, create school models for the 21st century, and to grow a new industry from our unique advantages as a state.

Eileen Rudden, a partner at LearnLaunch, served as chief of college and career preparation for Chicago Public Schools. 

Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs

We will have 1,000,000 unfilled STEM jobs in the US in 2020 (50% of the growth in computing).

In Europe the numbers are similar http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/grand-coalition-digital-jobs

And yet we also have this - large numbers of unemployed youth

http://www.npr.org/2014/07/02/327058018/a-lost-generation-of-workers-the-cost-of-youth-unemployment?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=morningedition&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20140702

Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs

The Commission is leading a multi-stakeholder partnership to tackle the lack of digital skills in Europe and the several hundred of thousands of unfilled ICT-related vacancies.

At a time when Europe faces massive unemployment, technology companies face a critical shortfall of talented ICT experts. This contradictory picture reveals a mismatch between the skills on offer and those in demand in today's fast developing technology market. As a result Europe might face a shortage of up to 900,000 ICT professionals by 2020, risking its potential for growth and digital competitiveness.

This is why in March 2013 the Commission launched the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs: a multi-stakeholder partnership that endeavours to facilitate collaboration among business and education providers, public and private actors to take action attracting young people into ICT education, and to retrain unemployed people. Our goal is to start to increase the supply of ICT practitioners by 2015, so as to ensure a sufficient number of them in Europe in the near future.

Recently the European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Vice President Neelie Kroes brought CEOs from across the global economy together at the World Economic Forum in Davos to expand the Coalition that is delivering digital training opportunities and jobs. Corporate leaders were then invited to endorse the Davos Declaration on the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs.

We encourage stakeholders to join the Grand Coalition either by making pledges for concrete short-term actions and forming or joining National Coalitions for Digital Jobs. We also strive to engage many more stakeholders through our events, workshops and meetings to share success stories and best practices.
So far, more than 50 pledging organisations have joined. The online Pledge Tracker shows the progress made in implementing the individual pledges. Moreover, national coalitions have already been launched in Greece, Malta, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Poland; and initiatives are underway in more than 10 countries.

Over the next months the efforts will be enhanced so that additional trainings, internships and jobs can be counted in hundreds of thousands instead of thousands and to make the Coalition sustainable. As such, the Commission seeks commitments from CEOs and political leaders to pledge substantial support for the Coalition, widening the membership to additional ICT and ICT-using companies. The Coalition aims also to reach out more companies’ HR managers and public, as well as private employment services.

Biden on STEM impact

The country hit its cap for H-1B visas within a few days, Biden noted.
“Imagine how transformative it would be if in the poor neighborhoods we were able to pluck out 280,000 individuals and put them on the path” to earning $80,000 per year, the average salary of an H-1B visa worker, Biden said. He noted his experience working with the program as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and said the fact that the country is not producing enough workers internally to fill the slots for H-1B visa workers indicates “something’s wrong with us.”
Biden also egged on the Change the Equation crowd’s work in STEM. He said business leaders don’t have any “overarching moral obligations” to push improvements to STEM education in their states, but that they “can get a hell of a lot done” by talking to governors  and working in their communities

NYT Freedman on Google Hiring

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — LAST June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies — noted that Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.” He also noted that the “proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time” — now as high as 14 percent on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, “How’s my kid gonna get a job?” I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.

Don’t get him wrong, Bock begins, “Good grades certainly don’t hurt.” Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more.

“There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock. “If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive.”

The second, he added, “is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.”

What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”

And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it’s “intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn.” It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,” said Bock.

The least important attribute they look for is “expertise.” Said Bock: “If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: ‘I’ve seen this 100 times before; here’s what you do.’ ” Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, “because most of the time it’s not that hard.” Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they’ll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.

To sum up Bock’s approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one — besides brand-name colleges. Because “when you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.” Too many colleges, he added, “don’t deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don’t learn the most useful things for your life. It’s [just] an extended adolescence.”

Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like G.P.A. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.

Lifelong Learners

Lifelong Learners

Learning begins early, extends in and out of school for years, and continues ongoing.  Google has taken initial steps to provide students with cloud-based tools to support their work in learning.  A next step together could leapfrog Boston to the forefront of emerging learning patterns, providing all current middle and high school students with the tools they need to work on learning in, out, and beyond their experiences in school.

Why Google?  Nothing is perfect, but Google is the most trusted, long-term platform for cloud-based living.  Few companies offer as high chances of longevity and consistency.  No other company offers the same value proposition for long-term ubiquitous computing.

For Google to have the impact it could on learning, it would need to address:

1. Transferability
2. Google Drive
3.  Blogs
4. Badges: (Common Core, Coding, Other)

Transferability. Kids are mobile.  Google Apps for Education is not.  Accounts must be transferable from within a school district account and into a new district.  This continuity is essential for long-term HMH is working with Google on a pilot to facilitate account migration and distributed trust administration.

Google Drive’s great fit for learners is obvious.  This “virtual laptop” gives kids automatically saved and sharable access to all their documents from any connected device.

Blogs.  Sharing work and getting feedback is the “hinge” between teaching and learning. Greg Nadeau’s recent TEDx talk on lifelong learning blogs (text below) explains how kids sharing their work with their team of trusting, loving adults can provide a profound system breakthrough in the amount of positive attention kids get.

Badges are the missing component.  Competency-based education demands an approach to learning based on standards not course structure or seat time.  Math and English standards are now well documented in the Common Core State Standards.  Teachers and common tests provide objective assessments, but parents and self-evaluations can also be very important.  The Scouts and FIRST Robotics provide other examples of standards that parents and other community members can grant badges on.

Fundamentally, a “badge” is a piece of evidence that the learner can do or has done a certain thing.   Different badge granters would have different credibility, but, taken together can paint a holistic picture of a learner:

Three Examples Lifelong Learning Badges

Fed Policy is Not STEM Friendly

Code.org co-founder and CEO Hadi Partovi testified about how federal education programs effectively discourage computer science instruction at a subcommittee hearing on today, and urged Congress to think about ways to fold computer science instruction into STEM and other education programs.

“There are countless federal, state and local policies that determine what is ultimately taught in our schools,” Partovi said, and they tend to leave computer science out. Computer science isn’t treated as a “core academic subject” in ESEA and computer science teachers aren’t eligible for professional development programs that science and math teachers are. Partovi also said that getting certified to teach computer science is “an ambiguous and confusing process” for many teachers and is “almost impossible” in a few states.  
                                                                                                                                 
Relatively simple changes to existing federal programs, Partovi said, could make things “much easier.”

Last year, Partovi’s organization held its first “Hour of Code,” in which 20 million students across the country learned computer science for an hour. The event was widely covered in the media and promoted by companies such as Google and Apple.

Politico

The jobs of the future

According to the Manufacturing Institute, 56 percent of manufacturing executives think the STEM workforce shortage will increase over the next three to five years, which could result in a shortage of as many as 700,000 unfilled skilled jobs by 2020.

Allyson Knox, director of education policy and programs at Microsoft, pointed to the recently released National Assessment for Educational Progress results, which found that only 36 percent of eighth graders are proficient or advanced in math. And there isn’t enough computer science education in schools, she said.

“Of the more than 42,000 high schools in the U.S., only 3,249 were certified to teach the Advanced Placement computer science course in 2013. That’s fewer than 10 percent,” she said during testimony.

10 Million Student Codefest

Computer science education is central to both a bright future for today’s students and innovation going forward. Let’s make a difference with one Hour of Code. Register now at http://hourofcode.com.

 

Code.org to support the Hour of Code: a massive movement during Computer Science Education Week to recruit 10 million students (and adults) to try computer science for one hour this December 9-15.

 

Aside from the 3-to-1 gap between computing jobs and graduating students, computer science is foundational for all students today. Yet 90% of schools don’t teach it, and fewer kids learn to program than 10 years ago.

What’s an Hour of Code?
It’s a one-hour introduction to computer science designed to demystify code and show that anyone can learn the basics -- on a browser, smartphone, or “unplugged”. The online tutorials won’t require any prior experience.

How can you help?

• Ask your local school to participate - share this handout and video with your teacher
• Participate yourself (or with your child). Set aside one hour to learn, during Dec 9-15
• If you’re a manager, schedule a 1-hour team event to learn together.

Sign up to participate at http://hourofcode.com, and visit back on Dec 9.

Hour of Code us supported by Microsoft, Google, Apple, Akamai, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and over 100 others, on this unprecedented initiative.