Microsoft's Math-Challenged STEM Education Contest 96
theodp writes "As noted earlier, Microsoft is tackling the CS education crisis with a popularity contest that will award $100K in donations to five technology education nonprofits that help make kids technically literate. Hopefully, the nonprofits will teach kids that the contest's voting Leader Board is a particularly good example of what-not-to-do technically. In addition to cherry-picking the less-pathetic vote totals to make its Leader Board, Microsoft also uses some dubious rounding code that transforms the original voting data into misleading percentages. Indeed, developer tools reveal that the top five leaders in the Microsoft STEM education contest miraculously account for 130% of the vote. Let's hope the quality control is better for those Microsoft Surface voting machines!"
Front page sucks too. (Score:4, Interesting)
Note the graphics and the at-odds text.
CSC's vision is to "increase participation of underrepresented groups in computer science" but shows two pasty white boys. Underrepresented? I think not!
Code to learn foundation shows two black boys in the classic, "This is all going over my head." pose (head leaning on hand). But hey, at least the confused-looking children are not pasty white boys.
CFY shows multi-racial girls looking up a a computer screen with the keyboard placed out of easy reach. Clearly there is no intention of them doing anything with that computer.
Code.org shows multi-racial kids, but the two in sharp focus in the foreground are more stereotypical white boys.
Teaching kids programming shows three girls mugging for the camera, but there's little suggesting that they're learning anything about programming.
The other photos are not that bad. But seriously, somebody should have reviewed the photos and said, "Is this really the message you want to send?"
Re:Farm4.staticflickr.com? (Score:4, Interesting)
While I am sympathetic to your point in general, I am not clear on how it applies to this particular submission. staticflickr.com is the domain that Flickr serves images from; presumably the submitter uploaded the images to Flickr so they would be on a solid host, and then used them in the submission. I doubt Flickr cares if he is increasing their traffic numbers.
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html [flickr.com]