Our family's public charity, Gotham Gives, along with Tech:NYC, puts on the Annual NYC Computer Science Fair with help from the broader tech community in NYC.
The Fair happened yesterday at the Armory in Washington Heights.
The Fair brings together about 2000 NYC public high school students who are studying computer science with about fifty tech companies and about twenty colleges and dozens of after-school CS programs. It was described to me yesterday as a "science fair meets a job fair" and that's exactly right.
The idea is to show NYC public school students, many of whom are from families with no connection to the tech sector, that they are candidates to work in tech if they take the right classes, work hard, and develop skills that make them employable.
We have been putting on the Fair since 2013 and even did two virtual fairs during the pandemic. The in-person ones are a lot better!
I had the pleasure of touring NYC School Chancellor David Banks around the Fair mid-morning. We stopped at about a dozen booths and rooms and met a bunch of students, teachers, tech companies, and non-profits working in CS Education.
That's the Chancellor doing a robotics project with some young women from Forest Hills who compete in a robotics tournament under the name Metro Joules.
My favorite moment of the tour was a visit to the Dream Machine which is a visual AI experience built by the Bright Moments DAO which is in the USV portfolio.
That's a student "prompting" the Dream Machine with a story about Spiderman playing pickup basketball. The students enjoyed coming up with dreams and prompting the Dream Machine to display them on the big screen. On the way out, the Chancellor and I discussed how technology like this could be used in helping students learn.
It gives me great pride and satisfaction that we can put on a day like this for the students of NYC. It could not happen without the leadership of Jennifer Klopp, who runs Gotham Gives, and the Tech:NYC team. And we are incredibly grateful for the financial support of our sponsors; Etsy, Justworks, Warby Parker, Kickstarter, Microsoft, Google, Coinbase, Uniswap, SoundCloud, Splice, Deloitte, Pilot Fiber and Primary VC. And huge thanks to all of the companies, universities and non-profits that had booths at the Fair this year.
