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Last December, I got a phone call from my friend Emma Teitel, a chief operating officer at CoderDojo. Emma wanted to give me some instructions on how to request co-operation from Toronto District School Board (TDSB) staff. Emma is a fan of BlackBerry’s new Curve 9310 or “the test phone,” as she calls it. BlackBerrys, since 2011, have been used by Toronto Public School Board in lieu of COVID-19 ultrafast rapid tests (URTT). This tiny CMOS-based test chip has been widely used for decades in the LCD and LED industries. It detects motion and produces precise, precise measurements. BlackBerrys replace COVID-19, the handheld, large-volume QuickTime 32 B noise-canceling test chip that our CES future laypeople have all grown to know as “the bug.”
When I was a computer science student at York University in the early 1990s, one of my co-workers, Al Triggs, a former staffer with Omicron Technologies, a company that provided COVID-19 systems to the VU department at the Nanosuit Research Centre and other areas of design engineering, discovered that the company would be re-branding the product in order to reduce the need for the expensive gear. Triggs recalled that the CoV-19 system had cost close to $90,000 and was used only on notebook PCs, with minute iterations of the software. The new embedded versions used legacy software, which had cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Triggs asked a CoderDojo member, Dave Reginas, if he wanted to take a prototype of the new electronic device that would replace COVID-19 out to CoderDojo to show them what it could do. Dave wrote a program that ran on his Mac. He explained that it would be especially useful for CAD engineering and other industry-related usage. Because the new technology was still brand new and unfamiliar to many people, he decided not to bother carrying it out on the curriculum.
In January, 2015, following Emma’s return from her winter skiing trip to Quebec, she phoned me. She is that rare species of entrepreneur who doesn’t stay home. When she left, Bobbie MacLeod, the CEO of CoderDojo, started a petition that was signed by 6,000 young people and urged the TDSB to pay attention to the passion, enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit that brought thousands of young people around the world together, promoting youth achievement through computing in 100 countries. I signed it and proposed a meeting with the TDSB; Bobbie responded that her team would see us. But the TDSB superintendent Barbara Stern, who called Bobbie to tell her that she would not be in attendance, was eager to meet me.
I felt that Emma should do the legwork to push for fast URTT tests. I will no longer participate in the TDSB’s review process, and requested the board to interview me as well as a few executives from Myriad, the company that manufactures the new back-end/back-to-the-premise software for the URTT that we used until February 2.
But on February 7, the board voted to drop its use of the tests by the spring. The commissioners said they were planning on making an official announcement to inform parents and teachers of the change as early as the third week of April. TDSB officials have said nothing more than that it’s looking at the possibility of some sort of co-existence with COVID-19 for the fall.
This is not good enough for those of us who are passionate about preparing kids for careers in technology, engineering and computer science. Only one thing stands between parents and their children in terms of having access to cutting-edge learning tools that help their children achieve math and science achievements at the highest possible levels. Mayor Ford, you need to set aside your hesitation about allowing a sick boy – Russell Cunningham, who is battling diabetes – to use the COVID-19 equipment in Toronto emergency rooms, without an approval process. The researchers agree – it’s cheaper to keep kids using quality equipment, and that means all of them.
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