Plans for the New Year

I've never been one for New Year's resolutions.

If I'm working on something specific, I might set a goal to finish it, but the idea of goals for a year never struck a chord with me.

It's one of the things that I find absurd about the current teacher rating system - I have to decided on my three goals for the year. I always have one goal with respect to my profession - to be better at it.

In any event, even though I don't have specific overall goals for me, there are some projects that I plan on pouring myself into this year.

The year closed with a lot of national hype over CS Ed. What remains to be seen is where we go with it.

I'll continue to try to work within the system - try to convince the new administration that supporting and replicating Stuy CS is something worth doing but I've been burnt enough to know not to put all my eggs in that basket.

Consequently, I'm hoping to put a lot of time into CSTUY. We're just about a year old and it's been a slow road but we're making some real progress - and this is just as a grass roots organization - it's just us and the StuyCS Alumni family.

So, what are the plans?

More Hacking Sessions

We started Hacking Sessions in October. Twenty New York City public high school students getting together to geek out and do CS every Saturday. We're off to a great start but there's a lot of work to be done. We'd love to get more students involved in the coming semester.

Start Summer Hackers

This is the big effort. A summer program. Since we designed and implemented Google CAPE NYC back in 2010, I've known the effect you can have with a strong summer program taught by master teachers.

We've got the teachers and the program, but it's still going to take a lot of work.We have yet to finalize on a location (we have a tentative offer for space but I'm hesitant to say anything until it's more concrete) and we have to do it early enough so that we can get to the students.

If we can get CSTUY's Summmer Hackers off the ground I'm pretty sure we can use that to launch a community of both hackers and teachers just as we've done at Stuy.

Get more people involved

I said that so far CSTUY has been grass roots only. In order for us to succeed, we'll need to grow our community. The hope and plan is to get the NY Tech community behind our efforts. I'm hoping that when they see us taking our proven programs out from Stuy to the greater public they'll come out in droves.

At least that's the hope.

So, those are my goals for the year.

Should be exiting.