Federal workforce reductions led to loss of institutional knowledge, creating a need for agency leaders to pivot on employee development strategies, CHCOs say.

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Teen reading, math, and science scores have fallen to their lowest levels since international PISA testing began in 2000, with 15-year-olds now reading at roughly the level previously expected of students a year younger. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) linked weaker results to more screen time, less reading for pleasure, and digital distraction. It also found that students who regularly used AI chatbots for tasks like drafting essays and summarizing text scored about 20 points lower in science, roughly equivalent to a year of learning. Reuters reports: A 2012 reading high of 501 on PISA's index had declined to a score of 466 last year. The test is widely regarded as the world's leading gauge of educational performance and its results are closely scrutinized by governments and educators. "In reading, more screen time and less reading for pleasure have gone hand in hand with weaker results," OECD head Mathias Cormann told a press conference. "We're also seeing more hasty reading, students rushing through a text and giving a quick wrong answer." Reading scores fell more sharply in students from better-off backgrounds, the study added. Hindered by falling reading standards, average teenage science and maths skills were also at their lowest this century. Science fell from a 2009 high of 506 on the index to 486, while maths was down from 502 to 469 in the same period. East Asia was the best-performing region. Chinese cities that participated in the test, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan had the best educational systems with Britain and Estonia the only countries outside the region that made it into the top 10 in reading, mathematics and science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WSU President Betsy Cantwell is a full-on techie.

She spent more than two decades in national laboratories working on space exploration, energy and defense, followed by top leadership roles at state universities in Utah and Arizona driving significant growth in research funding. The longtime sci-fi fan embraces “future-casting” — a systems engineering approach to imagine and prepare for technological shifts a decade out.

But if that leads you to predict that the head of Washington State University is blanketing her campuses with artificial intelligence, you would be wrong.

The essential role of a university is to foster a sense of wonder in students, and that is something AI will never do, Cantwell said in a GeekWire interview on Friday.

That wonder, she said, “is innately human, and when we bring that into everything you do in a university, you create humans that will actually be much better at ideating, managing and creating value out of AI.”

In line with that philosophy, WSU faculty decide individually how to incorporate AI into their research and classrooms, with students actively involved in shaping its use. The technology serves as a tool to reach a goal, but is not the goal itself.

As the head of WSU — which serves 25,400 undergraduate and graduate students across its main campus in Pullman, four branch campuses, and an online program — Cantwell uses AI as a partner. On a $1.3 billion annual budget that also supports 39 county extension offices and research centers, she looks for practical AI applications to streamline and better inform her work.

Drawing on her national lab experience, Cantwell believes AI can bridge the gap between basic research and commercial production. Instead of universities simply “throwing papers over the transom,” she said AI-driven modeling helps build proofs-of-concept and testbeds that help attract private-sector investments.

This approach is at the foundation of WSU’s planned $50 million, federally funded research center using AI to support salmon recovery and sustainable aquaculture, as well as AI-enhanced micro-climate tools from the university to aid Washington’s farmers.

One area where Cantwell is personally using AI is in navigating the turbulent business of college athletics.

In 2023 — two years before Cantwell joined WSU — the University of Washington pulled out of the Pac-12, triggering an implosion of the century-old conference that left only WSU and Oregon State as members.

Cantwell believes strongly in the value of WSU’s athletics program, calling it a vital convener that brings alumni and fans together across political and social spectrums, while also providing an academic doorway for student-athletes who might not otherwise pursue higher education.

To navigate the financial fallout, she built her own custom AI agent to run tabletop scenarios and model financial paths for WSU’s sports enterprise. She treats the exercise much like national security strategic planning.

The AI agent allows her to analyze variables including coaching salaries, stadium operations, student-athlete employment litigation, federal regulatory proposals, and revenues generated through Pac-12 Enterprises, the conference’s business arm. Cantwell sees the grit of WSU rebuilding after the Pac-12 split as a compelling story of innovation and entrepreneurship, one that new digital media channels can help broadcast.

Where Cantwell draws the line, however, is AI use in sports betting, which she views as a concerning manipulation of human behavior that threatens the integrity of college athletics.

GeekWire came prepared for our interview by asking different AI chatbots to predict the outcome of Sunday’s Apple Cup showdown between WSU and UW at Seattle’s Husky Stadium. Suffice to say, the AI says it doesn’t look good for the squad from the Palouse.

But before we could deliver that news, the top Cougar made it clear she wasn’t interested in hearing what Gemini, Claude or any other AI platform forecast for the game.

“The only reason why I would want to know the score in advance is if I was betting and I don’t do that,” Cantwell said. “Why do you need to know in advance?”

Kids are heading back to school across the country with a tool in their pocket that will do their homework, answer the questions they’re too embarrassed to ask an adult, and never tell anyone they asked.

MIT Technology Review asked kids aged 10 to 18 what they make of AI. Their answers had me plowing through every survey and interview with kids about AI I could find. Plenty of what kids do with it is ordinary: looking things up, homework, messing around.

This article is about the parts they keep to themselves.

1. Kids are taking their mental health to a chatbot, and telling nobody.

Nearly one in five Americans aged 12 to 21 has asked a chatbot for help when feeling sad, angry or nervous. RAND puts it at 8.2 million young people, and 63% of them told no one at all.

The silence is a calculation about what adults would do, as one teenager explained to YouGov’s researchers.

The most vulnerable kids use chatbots more.

• Internet Matters found that British children with a health condition requiring professional help are nearly three times as likely to use companion bots like Character.AI or Replika.
• A third of all child users say chatting with a bot feels like talking to a friend, and among the vulnerable that figure goes up to half.
• One in eight of all child users says they talk to a chatbot because there’s no one else, and among the vulnerable it’s nearly one in four.

2. Kids see both sides of AI in school.

Some teenagers see AI as a shortcut past the hard parts of schoolwork.

Others describe using it the opposite way.

Between May and December 2025, RAND watched homework use among middle school, high school and college students climb from 48% to 62%. Over a slightly longer stretch, from February, the share saying AI harms critical thinking climbed from 54% to 67%. The same students can hold both thoughts at once.

The Concord Monitor interviewed eight New Hampshire high schoolers this spring. They weren’t outraged at their classmates, but they described losing motivation to do the work themselves. One in ten teens tells Pew they do all or most of their schoolwork with a chatbot’s help.

Caledonia Mahon, a Concord High senior, watched a classmate stand up and admit he’d had ChatGPT write a personal reflection, and started wondering why she was still writing her own.

Her classmate Andrew Pfitzenmayer supplied the detail I can’t get out of my head, about a boy in his advanced history class.

Yet, the same technology can be positive for kids who don’t have much else.

By May 2025, 84% of American high schoolers were using AI for schoolwork at least occasionally. The kids who lean on it hardest have the least support around them, which is why telling them to quit doesn’t work.

If quitting isn’t the option, what’s left is changing what the tool does when a kid opens it. Two Seattle startups are trying that.

• Wild Zebra, started in 2024 by Edan Shahar and Erik Selberg, makes a math and reading tutor for grades 2 through 9 that answers a stuck student with a question instead of a solution. It’s gone from about 6,000 students in four pilot schools a year ago to tens of thousands now, and raised $6 million in August.
• Maximal Learning, built by Microsoft veterans Eran Megiddo and Liviu Asnash, ships an app called Wick that coaches planning, time management and study habits rather than producing homework. Neither company pretends teenagers will stop bringing AI to their assignments. Both are built so the student still has to do the thinking.

3. Kids are writing the rules adults haven’t.

Suspicion of AI runs strongest among the kids furthest from it: 78% of students who don’t use AI say it harms critical thinking, against 60% of those who do.

In July, 98 high schoolers from all 50 states spent three days in a replica of the U.S. Senate chamber in Boston and passed what Congress hasn’t. Their STUDENTS FIRST Act requires AI literacy, bars teachers from letting AI decide a grade on its own, lets a teacher ask a student to defend suspected work out loud, and gives any student the right to an alternative to an AI assignment.

A majority of educators told Education Week’s Research Center last fall that their district has no AI policy, or that they don’t know whether it does. At least seven states have a comprehensive one, by Education Week’s count.

Ashley Kannan has taught social studies for almost 30 years in Oak Park, Ill. He planned to ignore AI, then noticed that every conversation about it in his building was about catching students. He recruited nine eighth graders to spend a year working out what AI was actually good for. In April they briefed 60+ teachers and parents on the rules they thought were needed.

Hazel is 17, a rock climber in New York who wants to be an ecologist. She won’t touch AI, and her reason is specific: what data centers do to the water supplies of the towns they’re built in. Asked what advice she’d give other kids, she gave four words.

Hazel can afford that advice. Most kids can’t.

So the practical alternative is narrower than just telling them to quit: ask them what they use AI for, ask what they’ve decided not to use it for, and don’t make an honest answer cost them the tool. Right now 61% of young people say their parents rarely or never talk to them about AI, and 53% say the same of their teachers.

Hazel may walk away from AI. But Amira, describing a pain in her side to a chatbot, may not, and the odds are nobody in her house knows she’s doing it.

Robotics jobs in the Pacific Northwest are multiplying faster than universities can train people to fill them. The University of Washington thinks it has an answer — or at least a start.

This fall, UW’s College of Engineering will launch its first robotics graduate programs: a Master of Science in Robotics and a Graduate Certificate in Applied Robotics. 

The university capped enrollment at 35 students for the inaugural cohort. More than 30 people had already signed up for an information session before applications even opened. It’s an  early signal, engineering leaders say, of pent-up demand from regional powerhouses racing to hire engineers who can operate at the intersection of AI, software and hardware.

Program leaders say that skill set is rooted in a traditional, narrowly focused engineering degree that hasn’t kept pace with the rapid evolution of technology. UW is betting that the fix lies at the intersection of AI and hardware, echoing an industry buzzword called “physical AI.”

“Robotics is no longer confined to a single discipline,” said Xu Chen, a UW engineering professor and director of the Boeing Advanced Research Collaboration, who played a large role in the committee that designed the new programs. “The future will need a wide variety of robotics knowledge, and that’s what we built these programs to deliver.”

Applications opened Sept. 1 and will close Sept. 10, with UW aiming for a roughly one-week turnaround before notifying applicants. For its inaugural year, the university is intentionally keeping things small: 25 seats in the master’s program and 10 in the certificate track, which is designed for working professionals who want robotics training without leaving their jobs.

Chen said the small first cohort is by design, not a limitation. The goal, he emphasized, is to get the fundamentals right before scaling up. He expects the programs to roughly triple in size within three to five years.

“Companies are seeing newer potential in robotics as advanced computing and the wave of AI technology mature,” Chen said. “They see that their workforce will benefit from a modern robotics program, and that need is really what drove this.”

Getting there will take machines, and lots of them. UW is purchasing robots and computing hardware for its initial course offerings while also leaning on industry donations: robots, GPUs, and computing infrastructure among them, according to Chen.

Amazon and Microsoft anchored the effort early; the list of partners has since grown to include NVIDIA, Boeing, Dassault Systèmes — the French software company behind design tools like SolidWorks — and at least one smaller robotics manufacturer.

“The industry board was incredibly supportive from the start,” Chen said. “We’ve had almost a year of continuous meetings and collaboration with them and with representatives across our own engineering departments.”

The broader structure of the program is meant to make it easier for students from different corners of engineering, such as electrical, mechanical and computer science, to land in the same classroom and eventually choose their own path deeper into robotics through electives.

The program is also drawing on UW’s existing research muscle in the region. It taps directly into the Boeing Advanced Research Collaboration, which Chen directs, along with robotics labs inside the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. That gives students a line into the same research infrastructure that already feeds Seattle’s aerospace and e-commerce giants. 

The university’s ambitions extend well past this fall’s launch. Chen said UW has already mapped out longer-term plans for an undergraduate robotics degree and, eventually, a Ph.D. program, with the two new offerings serving as the foundation.

For now, the clearest sign of the program’s ambitions arrived this summer in an unlikely form: a pack of robot dogs let loose on UW’s campus.

“Seattle’s hills make it a uniquely difficult place for robots to move around, which is exactly why it’s a great place to study it,” Chen said.

Both students and faculty got a chance to operate the robots directly, Chen said. It was a hands-on moment that underscored how much more accessible robotics technology has become in just the last few years.

“It was exciting to see the students so happy to see the robots,” Chen said. “That’s the kind of energy we want to build this program around.”

The University of Washington has agreed to pay $600,000 to resolve a high-profile First Amendment lawsuit brought by computer science professor Stuart Reges, who was disciplined after including a parody land acknowledgment in a course syllabus.

The settlement, announced Thursday by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), follows a December ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that found university officials violated Reges’ academic freedom rights by retaliating against his speech and engaging in viewpoint discrimination.

“I am deeply grateful to FIRE for this legal victory which will remind public universities that they are obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of their students, faculty, and staff,” Reges said in a statement Thursday. He added that he hopes his protest helps reverse “a decade-long trend towards ideological conformity in academia.”

Under the agreement, UW agreed to pay $600,000 to FIRE to cover damages, legal fees, and costs. The settlement prohibits the university from taking further adverse action against Reges or removing the parody statement from his syllabi in perpetuity. While the appeal was pending, UW also rescinded and replaced Executive Order 31, the anti-harassment policy used during the investigation.

The dispute began in January 2022 after the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering recommended that faculty include a statement acknowledging Coast Salish Indigenous lands in their syllabi.

Reges, a teaching professor who has been at the school since 2004, opposed the policy. Instead, he included a parody invoking philosopher John Locke’s labor theory of property to claim Indigenous groups held “almost none” of the land occupied by the university.

UW officials responded by censoring the parody from Reges’ course syllabus, opening a yearlong disciplinary investigation under an anti-harassment policy, and creating a competing “shadow” section of his course so students could opt out of taking his class.

Although the university ultimately declined to formally discipline Reges, officials warned him that repeating the statement could trigger further punishment. Reges sued the UW in 2022, and while a U.S. District Court initially sided with the university, a three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision, ruling that student discomfort cannot justify retaliating against a professor’s speech on matters of public concern.

Reges’ lawsuit named top university leadership as defendants, including then-UW President Ana Mari Cauce, Allen School Director Magdalena Balazinska, Vice Director Dan Grossman, and College of Engineering Dean Nancy Allbritton. Current UW President Robert J. Jones is named in the final agreement.

The Ninth Circuit panel’s decision established that university teaching materials like course syllabi are protected academic speech, setting a binding First Amendment precedent across public higher education institutions in the Western U.S.

The University of Washington provided the following statement to GeekWire:

“The University of Washington maintains that we acted appropriately, and this settlement is in no way an admission of any wrongdoing. Given the Ninth Circuit’s 2-1 decision overturning the federal district court’s decision in favor of the University, a settlement agreement was the most reasonable option due to the attorney fees and costs that would have resulted from the Ninth’s Circuit’s decision. Prof. Reges has retained his faculty position and continued teaching throughout this process, and his status with the UW remains unchanged.”

Reges remains an active faculty member. Under the terms of the deal, he is free to include the Locke property statement on future course materials without administrative interference.

Read the full settlement agreement here.

Daniel Bernstein spent much of the past decade as an M&A advisor, selling other people’s software companies. This time the company was his own, and he found a buyer in McGraw Hill.

The education publishing giant on Wednesday announced the acquisition of Teachally, a small startup led by Bernstein in Bothell, Wash., that uses AI to help teachers build and customize lessons, assignments and assessments aligned to state standards.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed. The deal has closed, and all five employees have joined McGraw Hill, with Bernstein taking the title of senior advisor for Teachally integration and growth. He declined to say what the company sold for or how much it had raised, but said the outcome was good for him and his investors.

“We didn’t take in a pile of money,” Bernstein said, explaining that the company brought in a small group of angels and was able to stay focused and effective.

The five-person team is spread across three continents: Bernstein and a colleague in the Seattle area, co-founder and CTO Rushil Makkar in Melbourne, Australia, a customer success lead in Arizona and a developer in Ethiopia.

Bernstein is best known in Seattle tech circles for Sandlot Games, the game studio he started in a spare bedroom in Bothell in 2002 and sold to Digital Chocolate in 2011, after developing casual gaming hits including “Cake Mania” and “Tradewinds.” He later founded the mobile game startup UpTap.

Bernstein spent the following decade on the other side of deals, as a software M&A advisor at Corum Group and then at his own firm, Hemisphere Partners, which ran Teachally’s sale.

Teachally raised a small round from local angels about nine months ago, and later opted to try an M&A process. An edtech M&A specialist representing the company approached a small group of potential buyers, and Bernstein said he hit it off immediately with McGraw Hill over a shared view of what curriculum and instruction should look like in the age of AI.

Teachally focuses on teachers rather than students, developing technology for what the industry calls high-quality instructional materials, or HQIM, which is the standards-aligned curriculum that many states and districts have pushed schools to adopt.

The startup was working with about eight school districts at the time of the sale — fully commercialized, Bernstein said, but “still very much an early stage company.” It was named a top edtech product for curriculum and instruction by District Administration magazine in January.

Bernstein said he had to learn an entirely new industry after two decades in games. The M&A work helped: he’d taken other edtech companies to market before building one.

Teachally itself started as something else. The company was founded as EZ Reward, maker of EZ Stickerbook, a digital sticker chart teachers used to reward students and message parents. Bernstein pivoted the company about three years ago to focus on AI for teachers.

McGraw Hill, which went public last year and reported $2.1 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, said the deal will let it develop and localize K-12 curriculum faster and put AI tools in front of teachers already using its content.

“This acquisition provides a great opportunity to accelerate our AI strategy in ways that directly support educators and strengthen how we develop and deliver our K–12 products globally,” said Jana Thompson, interim president of the company’s School group, in the announcement.

Teachally is now live as a McGraw Hill product, with its own page on the company’s site.

Bernstein said it’s a second exit both for him and for some of the angels who have backed him along the way. “It’s a good Seattle story once again,” he said.

New York City Public Schools is banning generative AI for students from pre-K through eighth grade for the 2026-27 school year, affecting more than half a million students in the nation's largest school district. ABC News reports: In a statement to ABC News, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that the city is implementing a moratorium on generative AI for students in pre-school or 2-K through eighth grade and will spend the next year "studying the impacts of this technology." Mamdani wrote in part, "the tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary." "We do not see it that way," he added. [...] The district said it is implementing the most expansive AI moratorium in the nation, eliminating software that uses student-facing AI and banning companion chatbots. The city's AI moratorium does not apply to high school students. The district said it will offer twice-yearly AI literacy classes designed to help high school students "think critically" about the technology before they start to "rely" on it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's public education system has become "an avenue for multitrillion-dollar companies to enact their agendas," argues a NewYork Times reporter who's covered that tech industry influence for over 10 years. Big tech companies "advocate for new laws to require schools to teach industry-aligned subjects. They sit on committees that help shape learning standards for public school students..." The reporter concludes that "Silicon Valley's efforts to capture the attention of education professionals and provide student training materials can also double as marketing or indoctrination." They enable some of the most powerful corporations on the planet to spin rosy technology stories for administrators, teachers and students, giving them a sanitized view of industry practices and product risks. Many parents would likely object if, say, Exxon Mobil wrote their children's environmental science curriculum. Or if Purdue Pharma trained their children's biology teachers. Yet, over the last decade, schools have often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with few questions asked. The article excerpts the soon-to-be-released book " Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools," with the reporter adding more thoughts on LinkedIn: Every few years, Silicon Valley has urged American public schools to quickly adopt the latest technology or teach the latest tech subject: Big Data analytics; laptops for every child; algorithm-driven math and reading apps; compter programming; virtual reality. And each time the urgent arguments sounded remarkably similar: if schools just adopted the latest tech tool, or taught the latest tech subject, it would democratize learning for every child and equip students with valuable career skills. Despite good intentions, "today we know some of those classroom tech drives did not exactly pan out as advertised." Now some of the same companies that urged schools to provide laptops and coding lessons are employing similar arguments to urge schools to quickly adopt A.I. tools. I've spent years covering Chromebooks and student chatbot use. And I'm troubled by our collective amnesia around school tech. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Someone online shows them a 'trick' that feels harmless at first. Then the community pulls them in. Everyone's doing it. It feels like skill, not crime."

Seattle-based edtech startup Wild Zebra has raised $6 million to expand its AI learning platform for math and reading, citing early signs that its specialized product can hold its own against the free study tools released over the past year by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. 

One of Wild Zebra’s secrets is its Socratic approach: rather than handing over the answer, the platform works students toward it with questions, drawing out the reasoning step by step.

Another key difference: the lessons are customized to be grounded in whatever topics or hobbies the student is already interested in, such as sports, cooking, music, or anything else.

The platform also analyzes the conversations themselves, looking not just for students who are distracted or getting answers elsewhere, but for those showing persistence or curiosity — flagging those positive moments in dashboards for teachers and parents. 

The idea is “to catch kids being good, too,” said edtech veteran Edan Shahar, the company’s CEO and co-founder.

Latest funding: The oversubscribed seed round was led by Bellevue, Wash.-based Trilogy Equity Partners, with participation from Tetherpoint Capital and angel investors including Shrikesh Majithia. It brings the company’s total funding to $8 million.

Wild Zebra, co-founded in 2024 by Shahar and longtime AI technologist Erik Selberg, serves students in grades 2 through 9. The company, with a team of 10, plans to use the new funding for hiring, primarily engineers, along with sales and marketing initiatives.

Trilogy Managing Director Amy McCullough, who is joining the Wild Zebra board, said the VC firm backed the company for its potential to give parents and teachers a real-time view of what a student has actually learned, and a path to mastering the material from there. 

She said she came to the deal as a customer first: her family had used Test Innovators, the private-school admissions test-prep company Shahar ran for nearly a decade, and she was struck by how well it delivered for parents and students at a high-stakes moment. 

“When we were introduced to Wild Zebra, we knew very quickly that this was the team who could build the student-centric AI partner for the market,” McCullough said.

Competitive landscape: When GeekWire first covered Wild Zebra last year, OpenAI and Google had just launched study modes of their own. Anthropic launched a free version of Claude for K-12 teachers last month, and Khan Academy’s Khanmigo has been in the market for years. 

Shahar said the general-purpose chatbots are good at answering a single question or explaining a concept, but don’t keep track of what a student knows over time. 

Wild Zebra builds what the company calls a “learning tree” for each student — what they’ve mastered, where the gaps are, what comes next — and uses it to decide what they work on next, rather than just responding to whatever they happen to ask.

Shahar sees the big AI labs as suppliers more than rivals. Wild Zebra runs on their models, along with others. 

Traction so far: Wild Zebra says it now reaches tens of thousands of students, up from about 6,000 a year ago, and has logged hundreds of thousands of tutoring conversations.

It opened the platform to families this year at $48 per month per child. The first consumer customers, Shahar said, were parents at pilot schools who wanted it for their other kids. 

On the school side, Wild Zebra works through E3n, formed this year by the merger of the Educational Records Bureau and the Enrollment Management Association, which serve selective private schools. ERB invested in the company in 2024. 

Many member schools test students using E3n’s exams, and Wild Zebra uses those results to set each student’s starting point, though some schools using the platform don’t. 

Early results: E3n also conducted a 722-student pilot evaluation of math and reading, measuring results against ERB norm groups collectively built from hundreds of thousands of students. It found gains of four to eight percentage points among fifth and sixth graders.

Having started in private schools, Wild Zebra is now talking with charter and public schools. 

Shahar said schools and students skeptical of AI mostly don’t become customers, and the ones who do tend to share his optimism while still taking the risks seriously. 

The concern he hears most often from students is AI’s environmental impact — which, he acknowledged, is not something Wild Zebra is working to address.

“I’m not a Pollyanna. I think there are certainly potential downsides to AI in general,” he said. “There are people working on the downside mitigation. I’m working on upside opportunity.”

Top leadership is shifting at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, as Director Magdalena Balazinska‘s term concludes after nearly seven years. Dan Grossman, the school’s vice director and a long-time faculty member, will take over as interim director.

The leadership transition officially takes effect Aug. 17.

The school and the UW College of Engineering announced the move Monday morning, following separate emails sent to Allen School faculty and staff by both professors (in full below).

Balazinska wrote that she will take a “long-awaited sabbatical” before returning to teaching, calling the transition something “we have been planning and discussing for a while.” Grossman sought to reassure the community that “the transition will be smooth and not the cause of any significant changes.”

According to the Allen School, Balazinska was initially appointed to a 5-year term, which is the norm. Extending the term of a director or chair is not considered unusual at the UW or in the Allen School, but Balazinska did not want to extend beyond an additional year or so.

The interim leadership structure with Grossman will remain in place for roughly a year while UW leadership considers recommendations from a Provost task force on how the institution should organize its broader computing, data science, and AI initiatives.

The Task Force on Computing and Data Science was established earlier this year to evaluate whether the university’s administrative and academic structures are properly built to support the rapid growth of computing, AI, and data science. A central focus of the mandate was assessing limitations in the current model — where computing resides within the College of Engineering — and identifying alternative organizational structures, including independent units or cross-university institutes, to enhance research leadership, external partnerships, and student pathways.

Grossman, who served on the task force, said that the group recently completed its report for Provost Tricia Serio and President Robert Jones to review. Balazinska said, “it will take time for the President and Provost to consider and act on recommendations related to task force findings.”

“UW is working seriously on how to best position itself to lead in computing in the decades ahead and the Allen School will, of course, be a key part of that,” Grossman wrote.

Major growth for Allen School

Balazinska was named Allen School director in July 2019, officially taking the helm in January 2020 following the 13-year tenure of former director Hank Levy.

Prior to leading the Allen School, she served as director of the UW eScience Institute and as the university’s first Associate Vice Provost for Data Science. In those roles, she spearheaded the creation of UW’s undergraduate and graduate data science degree tracks, pushing to integrate data-intensive discovery into fields ranging from astronomy to oceanography.

An expert in database management systems, Balazinska joined the UW faculty in 2006 after earning her Ph.D. in computer science from MIT.

Her research career has focused on scalable distributed data systems, cloud computing, big data processing, and image and video analytics. More recently, her work has expanded to multimodal data management and the intersection of AI and data systems.

Her work in the field earned her the inaugural Women in Database Research Award, as well as selection as an ACM Fellow.

Under Balazinska’s leadership, the Allen School saw a 50% surge in graduate degrees awarded since 2019 alongside the addition of 40 new faculty members.

The school awarded more than 800 degrees this year across its undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programs.

Balazinska, who is also the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science, oversaw a major modernization of the school’s core curriculum. Her tenure saw an overhaul of the introductory programming sequence, the launch of an undergraduate research program, a new Graduate Certificate in Modern AI Methods, and the creation of a Data Science minor, with an AI minor currently in development.

In her email, Balazinska expressed enthusiasm about returning to her core passion after taking time away during her sabbatical.

“I am looking forward to returning to research, advising, and teaching,” she wrote, noting that she plans to rejoin the Allen School faculty full-time following her break.

‘My dream job’

Grossman has served as vice director for nine years, and alongside Balazinska throughout her seven-year tenure, acting as her primary partner in managing the school’s academic programs, faculty affairs, and strategic planning.

“To me, the Allen School is much more than one of the leading computer science and engineering programs in the world,” Grossman said in a statement. “It has been my professional home since I completed my Ph.D. 23 years ago. It was my dream job then, and it’s my dream job now.”

A long-time UW faculty member and expert in programming languages and computing education, Grossman has frequently paired with Balazinska to navigate the department’s response to seismic industry shifts.

Most recently, the duo collaborated on public-facing efforts to address growing student anxiety surrounding AI’s impact on tech careers, advocating for curriculum updates that integrate AI tools while reinforcing core software engineering fundamentals.

Beyond administrative duties, Grossman has maintained a heavy presence in the classroom, teaching courses in programming languages, software design, and computer ethics. He also leads the school’s direct-admit seminar for first-year majors and created a popular online programming course on Coursera that reached thousands of students over the past decade.

“I could not be more grateful to Dan for stepping into the interim director role,” Balazinska noted in her email to staff. “He understands every corner of the Allen School, cares deeply about our students and faculty, and will provide outstanding leadership as the university navigates the next steps for computing.”

Nancy Allbritton, dean of the College of Engineering, said in a statement that Grossman’s appointment “will ensure strong leadership and continuity during a period of thoughtful planning for the future.”

Allbritton also expressed her gratitude to Balazinska for her “exceptional service and leadership” as the Allen School “strengthened its standing as one of the nation’s leading computing programs while advancing its impact in AI, data science, and emerging areas across research and education.”

Read Magdalina Balazinska’s email to Allen School faculty and staff:

Dear Faculty and Staff,

As we have been planning and discussing for a while, my term as Allen School director is coming to an end. Later today, the Dean will formally announce the appointment of Dan Grossman as Interim Director when my term officially ends on August 17th and I take a long-awaited sabbatical.

We will have an Interim Director for the next year or so because of the ongoing  conversations on Computing, Data Science, and AI at UW, and how the University should organize itself and its efforts related to those important topics. Although the Provost Task Force is completing its work this summer, it will take time for the President and Provost to consider and act on the recommendations, and an interim appointment makes sense in that context.

My deep thanks to Dan for his willingness to assume this responsibility, and for the wonderful support he has provided to me in his role as Vice Director for the past 7 years. Dan and I have worked together ever since we joined UW as newly minted Assistant Professors over 20 years ago! Dan is a thoughtful leader who cares deeply about the success and well-being of our faculty, students and staff. I’m delighted that he agreed to take on this role at such a critical time for computer science education, for our University, and for higher education more generally.

As Director of the Allen School for nearly seven years, I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished — through some of the most turbulent times since we were founded as the “Computer Science Group” 60 years ago. We have not merely weathered those challenges — we’ve thrived.

Our accomplishments are too numerous to list in a short email, but a few highlights include:

We’ve grown substantially, graduating 50% more students today than in 2019, hiring 40 new faculty members (and also celebrating some retirements and other departures), and overhauling most of our processes to operate at this new, larger scale.

But we haven’t just grown, we’ve modernized our core educational programs, including our Ph.D. quals and undergraduate intro-to-programming sequence, while launching new ones: our Undergraduate Research Program, our Graduate Certificate in Modern AI Methods, the UW Data Science Minor (whose creation we co-led), and — now underway — a UW AI Minor. Along the way, we’ve introduced many new courses spanning quantum computing to AI-assisted software engineering.

Beyond the classroom, we’ve launched new research centers, initiatives, grand challenges, and research groups — including CREATE, Computing for the Environment, Globe.AI, and the Center for Learning, Computing, and Imagination, to name just a few among many others. We’ve also modernized our communications and website, expanded our research infrastructure, and raised very significant funds for new professorships, scholarships, fellowships, research projects, and other school activities.

We’ve also deepened our community support and activities — with new programming for undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff.

While working on the above, we’ve celebrated everyone’s ideas, accomplishments, and impact including our students, researchers and staff winning some of the most prestigious honors on our campus and in our field. It has been wonderful to witness firsthand all that you have achieved and to cheer you on!

It has been a tremendous privilege to serve as director of the Allen School. I’m grateful to you — the members of our community — for giving your best every day to advance our educational and research missions and expand our impact, sharing your ideas for how we could improve, and giving me — and each other — grace as we navigated new and often unexpected challenges. 

After a brief break in which I will see my daughter off to college(!), I’m looking forward to returning my attention full-time to advising my students and pursuing my research, while also supporting Dan in his new role together with the rest of the Allen School faculty and staff leadership.

Thank you for inspiring me, challenging me and supporting me over the past seven years. It has been a wonderful journey, and I learned so much about our community and myself along the way. And to my good friend and colleague Dan, congratulations!

magda

Read Dan Grossman’s email to faculty and staff:

Dear Allen School community,

Though you’ve already heard from Magda about the upcoming Allen School leadership transition, I wanted to send my own message as I work on transitioning into the Interim Director role.

First and foremost, I want to speak both for the full community and for myself personally in thanking Magda for her leadership over the last seven years. She has been truly extraordinary, managing both significant unexpected challenges (a pandemic is just one of several) and launching new initiatives across research, education, and how we organize ourselves that have set us up well for long-term success. Her steady, thoughtful, even-handed leadership is recognized throughout our community. Having worked closely with Magda, I want to add specifically, in case it isn’t as visible, two things: how she has sought out advice to reach consensus and develop new leaders, and how she has simply put in an enormous amount of time. Her sabbatical has been earned a thousand times over, but I’m also relieved that she isn’t going away and will be a key mentor and leader in the Allen School going forward. Thank you, Magda!

I want to assure everyone the transition will be smooth and not the cause of any significant changes – Magda has been planning to step down, and the staff and faculty leadership are ready. That’s not to say we won’t continue to change, in some ways rapidly, because that’s what we do as a leading school in a rapidly changing field and world. These are challenging times! The discussions I hear throughout the school on how we should adapt how we teach and learn, how we conduct research, and how we run the school’s operations are robust and exciting. They are also a lot of work by a lot of people, and I want to say that this work is not as ‘invisible’ as it may seem. 

While these are challenging times in multiple ways, it is also a time of great opportunity. Technology continues to change all aspects of our lives and we are well positioned to create new technologies that make everyone’s lives better and that help our planet, while also influencing policies to ensure responsible use of new technologies. I see many opportunities for us to grow our partnerships with other units, with external collaborators, and within our School to accomplish those important goals while educating a highly skilled, knowledgeable, and ethical next generation of computer scientists and computer engineers.

Let me also emphasize that “the Allen School” needs your help in reaching our aspirations. No Director, interim or not, can alone do even a small fraction of everything we aim to do. To be honest, I find it a bit odd when I hear “the Allen School does X” or “the Allen School thinks Y.” “The Allen School” is us, nothing more and nothing less, a collection of hard-working people with diverse personalities, ideas, and preferred coffee/tea orders. (Strange fact about me: I don’t like tea.) I’m proud to be working alongside each of you, and I am excited for us to continue working together to set the future course of the Allen School.

As Magda mentioned, the rationale for not having done a Director search over the last year is that it is complicated by the ongoing university-level discussions and processes on Computing, Data Science, and AI at UW, and how the University should organize itself. I was on the relevant “Task Force” that recently completed its report, and now the Provost and President will need to make decisions and launch next steps. When we have information about these next steps and how they affect us, including the timing for a non-interim director search, I will be sure to let you know. We should be excited by this – UW is working seriously on how to best position itself to lead in computing in the decades ahead and the Allen School will, of course, be a key part of that.

Thank you in advance for everything we will accomplish in the year ahead. Please don’t hesitate to stop me in the hallway or send me an email with your ideas or even just to say hello. 

Best,

Dan

Wenxin Fang was 14 years old when he realized he was fed up with fighting with a flimsy piece of plastic in math class.

As an eighth grader at Evergreen Middle School in Redmond, Wash., Fang kept bumping into the limits of standard classroom protractors — the cheap, clear tools generations of students have used to measure and plot angles. Frustrated by how often he had to realign the plastic arc just to mark a single line, he started sketching an alternative in his notebook.

Two and a half years and seven design iterations later, the incoming Tesla STEM High School junior is launching the ZeroPivot Protractor, a sleek, precision-machined aluminum hardware project aiming to drag an overlooked classroom staple into the modern era.

“I shouldn’t be fighting with a piece of plastic to draw an angle,” said Fang, now 17, during a call from China this week where he was meeting with suppliers ahead of production of his tool.

Fang launched a Kickstarter campaign on July 26 to fund the initial production run of the ZeroPivot. The campaign hit its initial target within 48 hours and has raised more than $2,200 from dozens of early backers.

Priced at $19, the ZeroPivot is positioned as a durable, high-precision upgrade over standard $3 plastic models. The funding will cover tooling costs and help manufacture the custom-machined aluminum components through HKAA Industrial, a supplier Fang vetted and partnered with during a visit to Shenzhen.

To make the tool work, Fang abandoned the traditional semi-circular design in favor of a guide-rail system made from anodized aluminum — a material choice he insisted on despite the higher production costs.

Unlike a standard protractor, which requires users to mark an angle’s vertex and rays in separate steps, the ZeroPivot features an adjustable sliding mechanism that allows users to plot and draw precise angles in a single fluid sweep.

“I went down this path of product design, trying to come up with something that’s small, that’s almost simplistic … that is able to improve the lives of people in tiny ways through good design,” Fang said.

Fang didn’t just keep his ideas trapped in his notebook. After coming up with the initial sketches, he brought them to his middle school engineering teacher, who encouraged him to build an actual prototype rather than treat it as a fleeting thought.

When he transitioned to high school, that mentorship expanded into a full support structure. A trio of teachers helped him turn his hobby into a legitimate consumer hardware launch:

• Steven Bonomo, an engineering and product design teacher with a background working on Microsoft’s Surface Laptop line, guided Fang through user testing, ergonomics, and physical product design.
• Andrew Christensen, who has a background in law, walked him through the corporate, operational, and legal logistics of starting his company, Bonae Artis LLC.
• Karen Schaeffer, a graphic design teacher, helped him refine the brand identity and the final visual aesthetics of the product and its packaging.

That guidance proved essential as Fang spent the past year user-testing prototypes in class on himself and his classmates, refining the tool’s feel and mechanics in real classroom conditions.

Balancing the demands of a hardware startup with high school homework requires an intense level of discipline — and plenty of late nights.

“It’s a ton of work, that’s just the reality of it,” Fang said. “If you’re pushing a project by yourself, there’s not an external deadline there. What you have to do is set deadlines for yourself and say, ‘Hey, this iteration needs to get out by Sunday.’ I do late nights pretty often just to get something in on time.”

For Fang, the ZeroPivot is just the starting point for a career he has been prepping for since childhood. His earliest memory of designing anything was at age 9 during Chinese Lunar New Year, when he used Lego bricks and superglue to create a custom ceiling hook to help his grandparents hang decorative lanterns.

Now aiming for a college degree and future career in product design and mechanical engineering, Fang sees the protractor project as proof of what simple, physical problem-solving can accomplish.

“That was kind of when I first realized, hey, I could make something so simple, and I could have somebody else use it, and it could be really nice for them,” Fang said.

With the Kickstarter campaign already funded, Fang is focused on executing the manufacturing run smoothly in China and delivering the finished ZeroPivot protractors to backers by his estimated February fulfillment target.

While he isn’t yet ready to reinvent the ruler or big pink eraser, Fang does envision creating more consumer hardware tools down the road. But his immediate motivation remains remarkably simple.

“I’m definitely focused on getting this through to fulfillment and getting this in people’s hands,” Fang said. “I think that is the most satisfying part of doing products — getting to see people using them.”

The road to space isn’t always a straight line. Sometimes, the itinerary for a career in the space industry begins with years of experience in other tech fields. And sometimes, it starts at an espresso stand.

“I actually started as a barista at SpaceX, and I somehow got recruited to go build Starlink satellites,” Kayla VanderPutten, a technical recruiter at Anduril Industries, said Monday at a downtown Seattle Tech Week session focusing on the intersection of space and technology. “I don’t know why they let me do that, but I was there for the first 500 satellites before I transitioned into recruiting.”

Over the course of 25 years, Joydeep Hazra’s career path took him through a series of jobs in telecommunications and network engineering, including management positions at Nokia, Mavenir and TRIDENTX. Now he’s the manager of a federally funded program focusing on electric vehicles at South Seattle College — and he’s getting involved in aerospace as well.

Last week, South Seattle College and the nonprofit Mars Society announced a partnership to build a space research station on campus, complete with a habitat that can be used for simulating missions on the moon or Mars.

The electric vehicle program could help students prepare for careers building Mars rovers, like the Chinese-built prototype rover that Hazra displayed during the Seattle Tech Week session.

Other technical fields could provide further opportunities for space-centric crossovers.

“When you’re building a lunar habitat, there are a lot more things to do than just going up and down in the rocket, and that’s where all of us count,” Hazra said. “Interoperability, frequencies, microgrids, plumbing, psychology, cooking — everything is going to be super-important, because without that, the lunar habitat would only have robots from China, and not our astronauts.”

South Seattle College isn’t the only Seattle-area school expanding into the final frontier: Two years ago, Amazon Leo (formerly known as Project Kuiper) partnered with Lake Washington Institute of Technology in Kirkland to launch a certification program for satellite technicians. Amazon also offers a Career Choice program that gives non-technical employees, such as workers in fulfillment centers, the opportunity to train for satellite manufacturing jobs.

VanderPutten’s career followed a less formal path. While she made coffee for the engineers at SpaceX, she also made conversation about the satellites they were building — and eventually jumped at the opportunity to join them.

“When you’re trying to build 10 satellites a day, it has to be really, really easy to do,” she said. “Once I moved onto the floor, the engineers really wanted my feedback, and I really enjoyed that. I don’t know if they always enjoyed my feedback, because it sometimes created more work for them. But that was probably the biggest surprise — being brand new and having these really talented engineers want my feedback, and want to help improve their designs based on what I was seeing.”

From there, she transitioned into recruiting for tech ventures. In June, she started a new job at Anduril, a defense tech company that’s rapidly expanding in Seattle. So, as a recruiter, what would she tell someone who’s not highly technical but is interested in the space industry?

“I would tell new grads and people who are junior in their careers to be curious, to learn how everything works together, and to ask questions,” she said. “You might feel that your question is silly or dumb, and you don’t want to embarrass yourself. But I can guarantee you that someone else in that room is going to have that question, and now you can go on and help other people.”