Techniques Jan 2013 - 22

The Way We Teach Now

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By Kevin Wang

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etting called into the boss’s office isn’t always fun. Memories of trips to the school principal’s office flash through your mind. But the day last year that I was called in to meet with our division vice president turned out to be a very good day. Executives at my company, Microsoft, had noticed the program I created in my spare time to train and place industry professionals as volunteer computer sciTechniques
January 2013

ence (CS) teachers at local schools. They thought it was a great idea that needed to grow. So I was offered the chance to run the program full-time, with backing from the company. Thus the Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS) program was “officially” born. But the program had begun unofficially three years earlier, in 2009, when I taught a first-period computer science class at a Seattle high school in the mornings before I went to work.

While some thought it was a strange way for me to spend my early mornings, it was actually a very natural thing for me to do. After earning an electrical engineering and computer science degree from UC Berkeley, I taught computer science for three years in California and then went to Harvard for a master’s degree in education. I joined Microsoft to work on Office365 and soon discovered a serious gap affecting both education and the technology sector.
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Techniques Jan 2013

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