Rock CS 2023 | Rocky Mountain Computer Science Conference for P-12 Educators

For your students to be successful in an IT career, they must understand the cloud: what it is, and how it works. It is incumbent upon serious computer technology teachers to offer cloud training. Three of the top cloud vendors are: (1) Amazon Web Services (AWS), (2) Microsoft Azure, and (3) Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

AWS is the largest and most developed of them all. Teaching AWS is not a walk in the park as it offers 200+ different services. Working with the cloud requires an understanding of myriad technologies: virtualization, relational and non-relational databases, hardware choices (CPU, RAM, etc.), operating system choices, and security, among others.

In this presentation I will show you a bit of what AWS Academy (your entrée into teaching AWS to students) looks like, and I will also show you the AWS interface itself. One of the best features of teaching AWS is that everything can be done via a browser. However, please be aware that the AWS interface in and of itself is a lot to learn. I want to caution you that this is a "long haul" endeavor. You will NOT know everything there is to know about AWS in this session, but my hope is that you will leave the session encouraged to explore in more depth how you can get involved and help students add a huge paragraph to their technical resume when they are applying for those first IT positions.

Participant Skill Prerequisites: The more you know about topics like virtualization, the better off you'll be. Additionally, if you have a sense of what "client/server computing" is, you'll have an easier time grasping the subject.