Technology

I got into volunteering through TEALS, Microsoft’s nonprofit.

Good for you / I'm sorry to hear that

The class runs on Chromebooks managed by Google Classroom, writing code on code.org—which is powered by AWS.

My condolences to the students. It sounds like they're already being brought up in a world where they are expected to own nothing and be happy.

I hope you teach them about how terrible this privacy violation is, and how they are slowly being groomed into dependency.

Corporate infrastructure is already the foundation of public CS education.

That's very sad too.

...wait, you're upset because you want to indoctrinate the children with more stuff?

This article reads like it was written entirely by AI, and I'm willing to bet the "Promt Author" won't deny this either given their promotion of AI. Its not just the em dashes, there's a particular AI vernacular that's becoming more and more obvious.

I don't disagree with the idea that we need to prepare our future generations for the rapidly changing world of technologies etc, but like most others in the comments, I'm sceptical about embracing these technologies without careful consideration for what it means for generational knowledge and human intelligence in general.

The classroom runs on Chromebooks, Google Classroom, and code.org (AWS). Corporate infrastructure top to bottom.

This is so dystopian. Get the kids hooked on XaaS while they are young, and you'll have a customer for life.

I'm so happy I live in a welfare state, and gee I hope we manage to make the switch away from the US big tech monopoly.

One of the best (also most intimidating) teachers I ever had would do this when students asked questions - asked questions in response, gradually leading the student to discover, by publicly stating, what they understood and what they did not.

Everyone misunderstood him (Turkish guy teaching EMF in the US) and thought he was just trying to embarrass and shame them. Though to be fair, I DO think he had some serious resentment toward the sense of entitlement many students approach their education with, and I share it.

His attitude left a bit to be desired, but if you were willing to humble yourself and truly engage with him when you asked a question (AKA not just retreat when he starts probing) - he just had this magical ability to ask questions until you revealed (seemingly to yourself) precisely what you had missed. Never really seen anything quite like it, he was distinct. And he respected and became warm with the students who would humble themselves and publicly try, too, which came as a shock given his permanently grumpy, disappointed demeanor. Plus he went some years where no students achieved that breakthrough, so his reputation never included notes about such.

(Uhh, my bad, just went down memory lane and only some of that has to do with what you said lmao)

Hard pass. There absolutely should be no AI in any classroom under any circumstances. The whole point of a classroom is to build a foundation on which to understand the fundamentals before they slap a set of training wheels on and vibe-code their way into disaster. Most of these LLMs ignore whatever guardrails you slap on them far too frequently.

The most important lesson these kids need to learn is if you can't do it yourself, you shouldn't be letting an LLM do it for you. If the best you can say about the effects is "This version doesn't seem to be actively harming them" then the bar is in hell, and we shouldn't be playing with these tools at all at this point.

Thanks for volunteering to flood the workforce with useless idiots!

"Using" AI is not well defined. I assume the one that showed no difference is because the students found it useless.