I had an excellent intro CS teacher in 9th grade who was ex-Army with an actual CS degree. He also taught Algebra. We got to spend a year of course basically playing around in Hypercard.
I also had a mediocre programming class in 10th grade at the Sr. High school taught by a part time business teacher. We spent a semester programming in Basic on a decade old IBM box. You can guess which class was the better influence on my decision to go into CS full-time.
The frustrating thing was that there was an entire lab full of 5-6 year old Macs that we were not allowed to touch outside of typing classes, so the decision to use the crappy 10 year old non-GUI machines was basically curriculum related.
The point being, teachers are important (and this initiative won't help with that), but even getting some good tech into the hands of students would help more than you realize. There are still schools with not enough resources to teach a decent CS course or more than a vague idea of what kind of curriculum would cut it in the real world.
I also had a mediocre programming class in 10th grade at the Sr. High school taught by a part time business teacher. We spent a semester programming in Basic on a decade old IBM box. You can guess which class was the better influence on my decision to go into CS full-time.
The frustrating thing was that there was an entire lab full of 5-6 year old Macs that we were not allowed to touch outside of typing classes, so the decision to use the crappy 10 year old non-GUI machines was basically curriculum related.
The point being, teachers are important (and this initiative won't help with that), but even getting some good tech into the hands of students would help more than you realize. There are still schools with not enough resources to teach a decent CS course or more than a vague idea of what kind of curriculum would cut it in the real world.