Allen School News

The UW Daily writes:

“Twenty-three tech leaders recently sent a letter to the Washington State Legislature endorsing the funding of a new computer science and engineering (CSE) building on campus …

“[Jeremy] Jaech is the CEO of SNUPI Technologies, a UW spin-off that makes in-home sensors that detect issues like flooding. He said that newer companies like his need local talent …

“‘Companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have the wherewithal to hire people from all around the world and bring them in,’ Jaech said. ‘But companies like ours, well, we can’t do that. We can’t afford to relocate people from across the country.’

“‘When we invest in our kids, they get educated here, they find great jobs here, and raise their families here,’ [Technology Alliance Executive Director Susannah] Malarkey said. ‘So there is no reason not to be really ramping up the public investment in Computer Science & Engineering.’

“Expanding the opportunities to major in computer science at the UW would prepare students for this new local economy, [UW CSE’s Ed] Lazowska said.

“‘Washington state kids ought to have the opportunity to get an education to be a first-tier participant in this information economy, and that’s what we’re trying to do.'”

Read more in the UW Daily here.

Check out the legislative letter here.

And learn the compelling case in our legislative handout here. Read more →

Ed Lazowska, Aber Whitcomb, Geoff Entress, Andy Liu, and Greg Gottesman

Tonight was the final class session of Greg Gottesman‘s phenomenal course “Entrepreneurship: Company-Building from Formation to Successful Exit.” The course this quarter had a bit more than 60 students: UW CSE undergraduate and graduate students, and Foster School of Business MBA students.

Right on schedule, tonight’s topic was “Exits,” featuring a presentation by UW alum Aber Whitcomb (co-founder of MySpace, currently CTO of Social Gaming Network), followed by a panel discussion moderated by Greg and including Aber and top Seattle angel investors Geoff Entress and Andy Liu.

Many thanks to Greg and to all of the phenomenal presenters he engaged this quarter! Read more →

A famous historical UW CSE photo, lost for over 25 years, has been located in North Carolina. This photo, of CSE graduate student Monkey W. Duncan (ABD ‘89), graced the grad student photo board on the lower level of Sieg Hall (CSE’s home prior to the Allen Center) in the late 1980s. The photo also shows the advanced technology that was available to CSE graduate students at that time.

Unfortunately, Mr. Duncan never completed the program, as the Ph.D. quals in the 80s required students to pass a long written exam, and he was unable to hold a pencil. He did pass the oral theory exam, however, correctly responding to the question about whether P equals NP with a series of barks. After failing the quals he ran into legal troubles, and Prof. Hank Levy had to provide a character witness to a Seattle judge when Mr. Duncan was charged by the Seattle police for “walking without a leash.” He eventually relocated to Chapel Hill, NC, along with his office mate Kevin Jeffay, now Chair of UNC’s Department of Computer Science. Read more →

Washington Monthly‘s “The Other College Guide” is chock full of great advice:

“Other books cater mostly to students from well-to-do families trying to get into the most exclusive, priciest schools. The Other College Guide is for every student …

“Other books … rank schools based on how many students they turn away, or how much money they raise and spend, or how other college presidents rate them. But these metrics … are mostly measures if inputs, not outcomes. So The Other College Guide ignores such criteria and instead ranks colleges based on the best available data about what really matters (or should matter) to you …

“Other books are full of happy talk about how wonderful America’s higher education system is and how every college has something to offer. Baloney! There are a lot of terrible colleges out there …

“Other books only profile the most prestigious colleges or the ‘Best Party Schools.'”

Best-Bang-For-The-Buck in the Western US:  #1, out of 233 schools ranked: The University of Washington. (UW-Bothell is #13. UW-Tacoma is #22. Evergreen is #29. Western is #30. Eastern is #37. Central is #44. WSU is #68.)

50 Schools You Should Know About:  #1 in the West, out of 10 schools listed: The University of Washington. (UW-Bothell is #5. Evergreen is #8. Western is #9.)

Troubled Waters: The Community College Transfer Swamp: “If you intend to earn a four-year degree and you’re starting at a two-year college, the truth is that you’re in for a challenge. Three-fourths of students who start at a community college with the intention of earning a degree or transferring to a four-year institution end up doing neither after six years.”

Best Community Colleges: Washington colleges listed, among 50 nationwide, are Grays Harbor College (#15), Cascadia Community College (#22), Green River Community College (#44), Tacoma Community College (#46), and Highline Community College (#47). Congratulations to these five Washington community and technical colleges for doing well at the things that matter!

Read this book! Get it at Amazon (paperback or Kindle) here. Read more →

WTIA CEO Michael Schutzler writes in GeekWire:

“The Seattle area is home to more software development engineers than any metropolitan area in the country. More than Boston. More than New York. More than San Francisco.

“When it comes to software, we are number one. Our deep talent pool in this field is one of the reasons why Apple, Google, Facebook, and so many other global tech powerhouse companies have opened large offices here.

“The impact on our region has been extraordinary. Each software engineering job has led to seven other jobs in the wider economy. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created in a time when most communities across the nation have struggled to maintain jobs.

“Thanks to our entrepreneurial vitality, we now create software engineering jobs about ten times faster than we produce grads qualified to take those positions. This makes us a top recruiter of software talent in the nation.

“Our investment in public education, however, has not kept pace. As a result, we have an access dilemma.

“One example of limited access is the University of Washington Computer Science program, one of the best in the world and the largest in our state by far. UW graduated less than 300 combined bachelors, masters and PhD students last year. Nearly 1000 students were interested and qualified to pursue a degree in Computer Science – but we did not have the classrooms or faculty available to teach them …

“Legislators must now fund additional computer science capacity. In the near term, the focus must be on doubling the University of Washington Computer Science program and sensible expansion at a few other universities. Next, we must make computer science available to all Washington public school students at least in high school if not before. And our job is not complete until our software engineering workforce reflects the diversity in our community.”

Read more here.

Learn about two recent initiatives to address the issue here and here. Read more →

Curious about computer science? UW CSE’s summer daycamps introduce middle and high school students to computer science through programming projects, magic tricks and faculty presentations.

2015 camp dates are now posted! Registration opens on March 9. Please note: These camps are meant for students who are new to computing and have not completed a previous camp.

Girls Camps

• Grades 7-9: Aug 10 – 14 or Aug 17 – 21
• Grades 10-12 and pre-college freshmen: July 27 – 31 or Aug 3 – 7

Co-ed Camps

• Building Android apps, for grades 7-9: July 21 – 24 or Aug 11 – 14
• Physical Computing, for grades 10-12 and pre-college freshmen: June 29 – July 2 or July 7 – 10

Lots more information here.

Learn more about UW CSE’s extensive K-12 outreach program, DawgBytes, here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, founded the non-profit Enlearn to bring what he calls the “generative adaptation” approach to student learning. Now, through a new partnership with education publisher Voyager Sopris Learning, it is bringing its adatable curricula to market. The deal will make new tools in English language arts and reading comprehension, built on the Enlearn platform, to K-12 schools across the country.

Frank Catalano of GeekWire writes:

“Initially developed for tablets and now web-based so as to be device-agnostic, Enlearn’s platform – and promises – at first sound a lot like other edtech personalization plays …

“But the differences, according to founder and Chief Scientist Zoran Popovic, are that Enlearn also adapts to the classroom environment and the teacher, and isn’t just focused on mastering specific subject content, but also gauges students’ engagement and ‘persistence’ to aid in motivating them.”

Zoran will officially announce the partnership in a presentation at the SXSWedu conference in Austin next week. Read the excellent profile of Enlearn on GeekWire here, and learn more about the new publishing partnership, also courtesy of GeekWire, here.

Read our previous blog posts on Enlearn here and here. Read more →

Today, State Representatives Drew Hansen (D – Bainbridge Island) and Chad Magendanz (R – Issaquah) addressed the Governor’s STEM Education Innovation Alliance, which includes UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska among it’s ~20 members.

Reps. Hansen and Magendanz have spent two years gaining a deep understanding of STEM in our state, and forging a bipartisan alliance to address key gaps. Among their findings:

• Knowledge of Computer Science and “computational thinking” is a key capability for all citizens in this century. Access to Computer Science must be expanded in K-12; professional development for teachers is a key component of this.  HB/SB 1813, which they have co-sponsored, addresses this.
• Focusing on higher ed, by far the largest workforce gap in our state is in computer science – the only other “field” with any significant gap between “jobs available” and “degrees granted” is all of Engineering lumped together (Electrical, Mechanical, Aerospace, Civil, Chemical, Materials, …), and the gap in Computer Science is 2.5X the gap in Engineering. Within Computer Science, UW CSE, Washington State University EECS, and Western Washington University CS are the only programs in the state that feed significant numbers of students to leadership companies. Reps. Hansen and Magendanz will be advocating a targeted investment to grow these programs.

Thank you, Reps. Hansen and Magendanz, for being smart, hard-working, focused, bipartisan, and data-driven! Read more →

Rep. Drew Hansen

HB 1813, a bill to invest in K-12 computer science education, yesterday was passed by the Washington State House of Representatives by the overwhelming vote of 91-7. We don’t know who the 7 were, but it’s presumably the same folks who don’t like puppies.

The bipartisan measure was sponsored by Reps. Drew Hansen, D-Bainbridge Island, and Chad Magendanz, R-Issaquah.

“We want every student in the state to have the opportunity to learn computer science” said Hansen.

Rep. Chad Magendanz

“Seventy percent of job growth is in computer science, yet only ten percent of our high schools offer computer science classes,” noted Magendanz. “This is the most significant thing we can do to increase the opportunity for our children, our next generation, our future workforce …”

Read more here and here. Read more →

Or so says a petition being circulated at Yale, where students are pushing for increased investment in the field.

Bloomberg Business writes:

“Want a Job in Silicon Valley After Yale? Good Luck With That …

“Yale, one of the world’s top universities in most respects, has fallen behind in computer science. It doesn’t crack the highest tier of schools measured by the number of graduates in software companies or by salaries for majors in the discipline; it’s struggling to educate throngs of students with a faculty about the same size as three decades ago; top students in the field are opting to enroll elsewhere; the head of its computer science department is publicly complaining; and undergraduates are circulating a petition in protest …

“‘These are skills needed by anyone in the modern age,’ says Jeannette Wing, who oversees research labs worldwide for Microsoft. All students should learn programming, even those studying such fields as archeology and English, she says …”

“It’s a fine smaller program,” says Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, one of the top-ranked programs in the country.”

Read more here. Read more →