Amazon to Teach 10 Million Engineering Students a Year

Amazon recently launched a program to help more students in becoming computer engineers. The programme aims to teach more than 10 million students a year, where the students will get to learn, how to code. Amazon also assured that it would pay for summer camps, teacher training and other initiatives to help kids and young adults from lower income families. 

The programme is called Amazon Future Engineer. Though they haven’t yet specifically mentioned how much the course fee will be. Other tech giants such as Facebook and Microsoft too are planning to bring coding to the schools, which could ultimately benefit the companies in the future. There is a shortage of computer engineers and teaching students to code will help these companies to ensure a pipeline of future talent to hire from. 

Jeff Wilke, the Chief Executive Amazon's worldwide consumer, says he hopes that the students who go through the Amazon Future Engineer programme will be hired by the company in the course of time. This programme aims at creating skills for its Alexa voice assistant and programming its delivery drones. He also said that other companies are depending mainly on the technology, but there is no alternative to coding, as it has become a valuable skill to the employers. 

Wilke said, “We’re pretty confident that knowing how to code will be as important as knowing how to read for the jobs of the future”.  

Amazon Future Engineer will offer kids in the kindergarten up to the eighth grade, free summer camps and after-school programmes, which will take place in Amazon offices across the country. Amazon employees will volunteer in teaching online classes, lessons and games which will be provided by Amazon’s partners like Code.org and Coding with Kids. 

Amazon will also pay for online training of the teachers at 2,000 low-income high schools across the country. Along with this, the programme will offer college students with scholarships and internships. Schools, teachers and parents will be able to apply for the programme through AmazonFutureEngineer.com. 

Some schools have already started testing the programme, for example, Monsignor Scanlan High School in New York, where the Science teacher Jennifer Tulipano has started taking coding classes online from September this year. She has also started two computer science classes where the students are able to learn how to create games and make animated characters dance.