A Global Look at AWS Educate: Building Skills for the Future

This year, we have seen many new updates to AWS Educate from new badges to new relationships, all with the common mission of building skills for the future worldwide.

With over 1,500 institutions and hundreds of thousands of students who use AWS Educate, we wanted to take you on a trip around the world and highlight how students are learning and innovating with the cloud.

Our first stop: Singapore. The AWS Educate team has been engaging the Digital Readiness Cluster of InfoComm Media Development Authority (IMDA) whose key charter is to reach out to all schools in Singapore. We are working with them to support the Singapore Smart Nation movement by building computational thinking capabilities among students and the broader Singapore population. One of the initiatives this team has undertaken is “Labs on Wheels.” IMDA set up four busses to be fitted with content and delivered by 12 instructors. They have visited 360 schools in Singapore. Learn more about the “Labs on Wheels” in this video.

Additionally, AWS Educate engaged with the Girls’ Brigade in Singapore to equip 3,600 young women and girls with cloud literacy skills. Participating girl “scouts” received a physical AWS Educate badge for their uniforms upon completion.

Now, let’s head to Australia. The Alexa Competition is an opportunity for Western Sydney high school students to experience cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technology. Teams of high school students work together to develop and build an Alexa Skill – from ideation to programming with the Alexa Skills Kit. The Theme for Alexa Competition 2018 is ‘Build for a Better Tomorrow’. Teams are encouraged to develop an Alexa Skill that improves the community where they live.

In the Philippines, we hosted the biggest AWS GameDay during Siklab in June with 400 students. AWS GameDay works closely with the World Skills organization, which recognizes 45 skills areas in over 75 countries in order to build confidence, empower communities, and help to fuel economies. World Skills Philippines attended AWS GameDay during Skilab and offered national level certification to all who completed AWS Siklab Pilipinas. After this experience, World Skills agreed to add cloud computing as a newly recognized skill and AWS will support the selection process, judging, and technical support.

Following the success of the first Siklab, we launched our second AWS Siklab Pilipinas (Siklab) event at the University of Philippines in Quezon City Philippines in September. This event grew the Siklab model to a much larger scale. In collaboration with Youth for Information Technology (Y4iT), AWS attracted 2,800 young Filipinos to attend a customized cloud computing bootcamp and gamified hackathon event.

Last stop: Egypt. In collaboration with the World Bank Group (WBG) and the Egyptian Ministry of Education and Technical Education’s “Skills for the Future” Initiative, AWS Educate launched the first cloud computing bootcamp for 200 students in Cairo, Egypt, in June 2018. The pilot event also followed the AWS Siklab Pilipinas model and led to a deepened and expanded relationship with the WBG, national influence in Egypt, and AWS Educate integration with Egyptian Knowledge Bank.

Want to learn more about AWS Educate around the world? Tune in to the Workforce Development Using AWS Educate special series on the AWS Podcast and hear from students, educators, and academic leaders alike on cultivating the future cloud-ready workforce.