Amazon Tech Engineer looks to turn old school buses into mobile tech labs. Thomas Phillips, an Amazon Engineer, presented his idea to turn abandoned school buses in the city of Detroit into high tech mobile tech labs. The idea was presented in August at the Hack the Central District Cultural Innovation Conference (Hack the CD) in Seattle.

The concept is called “The Aspire Tech Bus” and this is where students would learn to code, work on projects and act as an develop their skills as an actual software development team. Phillips’ idea would provide students with the basic fundamental skills of front and back end development, to include HTML, CSS, and JavaScript NodeJS and ExpressJS. Students who get to board the “Aspire Tech Bus” would also learn business skills such as project management and establishing professional LinkdIn and email profiles.

Every student will receive a Raspberry PI computer, this device is a small, affordable computer built for the purpose of learning programming, in a fun, practical manner. During the course which will last 16-weeks, students will have developed a portfolio of completed coding projects that they would be able to present to a potential employer.

Thomas Phillips explained:
“I envision this project as a ‘high-tech, voc-tech, as giving students high-tech skills before college will better position them for success. Some of them will choose to pursue their education further at the college/ university level, others will venture into the entrepreneurial sector. Both of these have far reaching implications that reverberate across the world.”

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