 From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE covering Imagine a Better World, a global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Educate Show. It's a public sector show. It's the first time they've ever done it, really focusing just on education as opposed to the regular public sector show or the AWS summits and reinvent that you're very familiar with. We're excited to be here. One of the big themes here is colleges partnering with high schools. And we're excited to have our next guest to really talk about how that's working in this program. We have Howard Stoll. He's a professor at Santa Monica College. Howard, great to see you. Thank you. And with him is Kota Cole. He's a teacher at Roosevelt High in East LA and also an adjunct professor at Santa Monica College. Welcome. Thank you. So let's just jump into it. There's a big conversation about training people for the next generation of cloud skills. It's good for the kids. It's also good for the employers. It's good for Amazon. It's good for their customers and their partners. How are the kids feeling about this? How is this program being accepted by kids? Is it cool? Is it something they want to do? How hard of it is of a sell, is it? The students are engaged. They're learning something that's immediately irrelevant to societal demand. Our students, they're setting up and spinning up web servers, web servers, file servers, even VPN. And the VPN servers, it's going to disrupt the way schools strategize and implement security. Because now when they go back to the high schools, they're bypassing all these web securities using VPN. Right. But they really do love it. The students seem to really drink it up. They get it. So is there a particular kind of classification of app or of all the different things that you're teaching in database security that resonates more than others? Or what is it that connects to what they do every day that makes them think, hey, this is cool. I engage these things every day. What a great career to get into. Yeah, I think they see Amazon in their daily life every day delivering them stuff, making them by having them deliver things. And they see, they can see as they peel apart the layers and see behind the scenes how Amazon actually gets that done. Right. And it seems immediately relevant to them. Right. And so their student interest has been fantastic. Been fantastic. And Coda too, I think it's always a thing too with, especially the kids when they're in high school, 15, 16, they're starting to get a little bit of attitude. Why should I read 400-year English novels, Dad? How's that going to help me in my job? Or why am I taking chemistry? I don't want to be a doctor. I get it. I got to take it to get into college. But I don't really want to take chemistry. This is probably something a little bit different in terms of direct kind of visibility into the application. I mean, those other things have applications too. You just don't see it when you're 15. But this, they can see, right? They can see how it's going to directly impact them in a positive way. Yes, and it also puts everyone at the same playing field, students that normally fail their English classes, math classes. Now they're in the same classroom and learning content where everyone's on the same page. So you've got your high-performing students, also with your students that are filling class, trying to discover what they want to do in life. They're together, they're working together, find a common interest and excel and engage and asking for more. Where can we take more classes? This is what I want to do. This is where I want to be. So... That's great. And another thing, we were just at a kind of a high school competition called Technovation early this week where they mainly girls teens from all over the world building applications. Same kind of a thing, you know, get them involved in an application that they can really see a difference. And, you know, they get it. And I wonder if some of your kids talk about, you know, everybody wants to be mission-driven today. And kids want to do stuff that has a higher impact on society, right? We've got four different garbage cans. We have to sort our stuff in because we want to be renewable and take care of the environment. Do they see that software, software is the easiest way to make a huge impact globally. Do they get that? They get that. They see it. They're instantly creating servers in five, 10 minutes going on their servers, setting up websites. They see the relevance. They're taking advantage of the technology. Yeah, that's great. So, Howard, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how a partnership with AWS enables you to do things that you wouldn't be able to do if they weren't kind of helping in this whole process. Yeah, we've been, at SMC, we've been working with AWS for about four years now to spin up this program. The partnership has been fantastic. AWS has been really giving and helpful. They helped train faculty, so we got professional development from them. Now, as part of this program, students get credits on the platforms, faculty get credits on the platform. They've been helping us with advertising and all kinds of other great things. And it's really been a wonderful, wonderful partnership, really fantastic. And that industry connection really makes a big difference in making the program succeed. Well, and you mentioned something I want to follow up on in terms of the staff. We talk a lot about the kids here and the impact on the kids in their education. But I'm curious to get your take on kind of how this has impacted the staff. It's kind of a new classification of learning, if you will, around cloud computing, specifically the subset of computer science, which has had a hard time squeezing in between science and math, especially at the high school level. But how are the staff and the teachers taking to this? Do they see this as a great new opportunity, bunch of new skills to learn? I mean, that's got to be kind of invigorating for them, I imagine, as well. I think so. I think it's really invigorated people who've been around. It keeps us on our toes, makes us learn new things. It's very exciting for many of us, and it has been great. And the wonderful thing about computer science is that it changes a lot. As I often say in math, they haven't invented any new numbers. But in computer science, what I learned when I was in school, oh my gosh, things have changed, a great deal. And so there's a commitment to keep current, and in the community colleges, definitely, we try to keep our curriculum current with what industry needs. Right, I think it's a really great statement on the role of community colleges in a very specific role to help match skills with needs in jobs. I mean, just really concrete, really straightforward, really kind of a simple mission. Yeah, and Amazon actually has connected us with local employers near SMC that have helped us validate our curriculum and actually are very interested in hiring the graduates out of our program right away because there's such a dearth of industry talent in this particular field. Which is great, just to close that loop. And if I recall, your certificate program is the model now that's been rolled out to all 19 of the LA community colleges. Yeah, so this program has really spun up and become much, much bigger than just one particular college. So we developed a number of classes at SMC and a certificate, and we're using that now as a model throughout LA County to bootstrap AWS skills in all the local community colleges. 19 other colleges are working with us, agreeing to run the same classes at their institutions. And that's very exciting as well. They've also agreed to find local partner at high schools to work with as well. And so we're really trying to build a hub of AWS experience down in LA in what we call Silicon Beach. Right, right. And then the goal ultimately is to get an associate program over some period of time when you get whatever the certification is or that process. We're working on building an AA degree in cloud computing as well. That's great. Cody, look like I got something to jump in there. All good? All good. Okay, good. So I want to give you the last word in terms of what would you say to educators that are not in LA about kind of what this type of program has brought to you and more importantly, your students in your everyday life at Roosevelt High? It has changed the lives of many students. It's changed my perspective on how I see education because in fact it was a little difficult getting the students to be engaged initially. But ever since we launched this cloud computing, every student, we can't get enough classes, sections open. We open one section up and it gets filled. The students are in class there. They want to learn material. And it's a good time to be in education. I love it. Good, well thanks for sharing the passion. It comes through. Well, the passion starts with our department chair, Howard Stahlkir. Right. He's very passionate and it resonates with all the staff members which resonates students. So now we have a synergy that's happening that we hope to eventually distribute to all the campuses and they can model, use Santa Monica as a model. Great. Well, Kota, Howard, thanks for taking a few minutes and really enjoy this story. I look forward to the follow up next year. Thank you. All right, he's Kota. He's Howard. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from downtown Seattle at AWS. Imagine education. Thanks for watching.