Will Teaching Kids How to Write Software Help Fix Young America?

Alex Fitzpatrick:

New York City is a hotbed of technological innovation, but many of its public school students aren’t graduating with the skills needed to be a part of “Silicon Alley,” as it’s known. Scott Schwaitzberg, vice president of Activate, is planning to fix that problem by helping to build a public high school designed to teach the city’s youth everything they need to know about writing software and the tech industry.
Schwaitzberg is part of a team that’s creating a revolutionary public high school for software engineering in the heart of New York City. Named “The Academy for Software Engineering,” the school will admit 500 students in grades 9 through 12 when it opens in the fall of this year. There’s a limited screening process: Prospective students attend an information session and sit down with an advisor to be considered for the admissions lottery.