Even before I retired I knew that after a break I'd want to get back in the game. Not full time, but in a limited capacity when interesting opportunities presented themselves.

Well, it's time to start dipping my toes back in the water.

Next week I'll be at SIGCSE but that doesn't really count. Last year I attended both SIGCSE and the CSTA conference so that's nothing new.

After I get back from SIGCSE though, I'll be covering computer science classes for a friend at Stuy who's going to be out on Grand Jury Duty. It's three sections mid day, the second half of Stuy's intro class - now dubbed CS Foundations. The material should be straightforward. I think they're still learning the basics of Python.

I've got a couple of concerns though. First, in the email that told the classes that I'd be covering, I was introduced as the guy who created the course. Now, I'm a good classroom teacher but really, my value isn't in individual super lessons. I'm not Edward James Olmos as Jaime Escalante (though I wonder if Jaime Escalante was Edward James Olmos as Jaime Escalante). I've got my moments but my rapport with my kids builds over time - a semester, a year, or even multiple years. I'd rather under promise and over deliver so I hope I'm not being oversold.

My other concern, well, not really concern, is that I hope they're far enough along for me to do something fun. I'm only with them for two weeks. If they've gotten to or close to lists, I can do some fun and interesting applications. If not, well, teaching if statements can only be so interesting.

In any event, I hope to have fun with this.

One extra surprise is that I'll be getting a grand-student out of this. I'll be teaching a child of one of my former students.

I'm also getting back involved by supporting CareerWise, an organization that sets up apprenticeships for high school students. I was introduced to my new friends at CareerWise by an older mutual friend and it was exactly the type of intro I was looking for. A friend thinking "hey Mike and these people should do something together."

CareerWise sets up and supports apprenticeships in a bunch of fields but I'm of course working with them on the tech side. They've got a software engineering track and a cybersecurity track. The basic plan is that the students come from schools all across New York City, they receive training over the summer - think of it as some sort of boot camp, and then go to their apprenticeship along with continued support from CareerWise.

They're doing great work but tech apprenticeships are a particular challenge. As I wrote earlier, companies are expecting even interns and entry level employees to know more and more coming in. It's not like the old days when companies trained up their workforce. Of course it's even harder with high school apprentices. They'll come in knowing even less and will have even more limited exposure to how one operates in the workforce.

Now, as I said, the apprentices get some training the summer prior to their placements but that's a real challenge. First off, while a small number of the kids might have had some serious CS, most probably had APCS-Principles or maybe not even. Think about it, in a short summer program you have to take a high schooler who at most has written very short programs in a drag and drop environment and industry wants them to be ready to go with a text programming language, version control, using an IDE and more.

Not gonna happen.

Even harder, one company might be looking to place their apprentices on a front end team using Javascript and React, another a backend Java team, another something in Python and so on.

This is really tricky. How do you design a boot camp for that? Even if you focus on the basics, if you prepare them for one shop, you wont be preparing them for another one.

That's where I come in. The hope is I can help manage expectations with the partner companies - help them to understand that these are high school kids with limited backgrounds and experience. They're smart and they'll work hard but a twelfth grader is very different than a college rising junior starting an internship let alone an entry level grad. The other hope is that I can help direct the training so that the training and the company expectations meet in the middle.

This is not an easy task and I don't have any magic bullets but I do have some ideas.

Well, on the expectation management side, that's easy. Well, not easy to actually manage them but easy to have the conversation. We've already started so hopefully we're going in the right direction.

The boot camp / training is harder. What to do? After noodling about it a while, I thought to redirect the training a bit. Instead of focusing on a bootcamp where kids create their own frontend only app (well, really more of a demo with very limited functionality) or some other completed program, I thought, maybe we should make the application "testing." That is, as the kids are going through the training, have them write tests for existing code bases (provided by the company that runs the training). This could evolve into tweaking and extending code as well.

When the kids start their software engineering internships, they'd start by writing tests rather than creating new features and again, they could, as they get comfortable in their apprenticeship be pushed then towards creating new code.

Why do I think this makes sense?

From the companies point of view, writing tests is super low risk and is something they always need more of. It also keeps the kids out of the codebase until their ready. From the kids point of view at the company, it will probably be easier for a kid to read and understand a small chunk of code and write a test for it rather than creating something new to integrate into a complex codebase.

From a training point of view, this exposes the kids to code reading and understanding - something rarely done and writing tests is probably a more gradual ramp up than diving into full programs. The kids will also learn professional workflows.

True, they'll still only be doing it in one language so if the training is in Javascript and their apprenticeship is in Python there will still be a professional ramp up but it will probably be easier to write tests in the new language given the example code of the code base, the code their testing, and probably other tests to mimic.

We'll see how it goes

So, that's what I'll be spending some time on over the next few weeks and months. Still just part time but happy to be back in the game.