As the global Hour of Code week, sponsored by Code.org, kicks-off today in classrooms, offices, homes, community centers, and coffee shops around the world, I’m reminded how essential it is that we continue to expand access to computer science education. Increasing the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in computer science will help drive innovation far into the future.
Our work with Code.org is focused on addressing the long-term challenge of making computer science education ubiquitous in classrooms, regardless of neighborhood, community, or country. This issue has the attention and investment of Amazon and many other companies, which makes us optimistic about the future.
As part of Hour of Code week, more than 300 volunteers and teams such as Amazon Future Engineer, AWS Educate, and Alexa will welcome more than 6,000 students to Amazon offices across the US and abroad. Niamani Knight is one of those students. She’s a fiercely driven high school junior, with a contagious smile and a passion for technology that she hopes will catch on. Niamani’s goal is to make learning to code and working with technology not only cool, but easy for anyone to understand.
Check out Niamani’s story to see how she is pursuing her goal with a little help from Amazon.