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August 30, 2019 10:00 am

Is Tech's 'Free' Business Model For K-12 CS Education Good Or Bad?

theodp writes: The challenges of competing against free have long been noted. In the K-12 Computer Science education space, those who build a better mousetrap will still face the formidable challenge of competing with free offerings from tech giants such as Microsoft, which on Tuesday highlighted a new collaboration marrying tech-backed nonprofit Code.org's free CS Discoveries curriculum and Microsoft OneNote for Education. "Microsoft is a key Code.org partner," reminds a Microsoft blog post, "and the organizations have worked together over the past several years to boost computer science education globally." Free K-12 CS education offerings tied to their own products (or even expansion plans) are also pushed on educators by the likes of Google, Apple, and Amazon. We've already seen some of the hidden costs of free social media -- so should the tech-bankrolled 'free' K-12 CS education model promoted and led by Facebook and others, which apparently even involves monitoring every coding move schoolchildren make ("Young women want you to interact with their apps! They use 10% more interactive elements in their App Lab projects than boys"), set off any alarms?

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