Natasha Singer at the Harvard Science Center

RSVP is required for this event.

Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, and the Harvard Library welcome Natasha Singer—a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting who has covered tech industry influence in schools for the New York Times for more than a decade—for a discussion of her new book, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools. She will be joined in conversation by Cathy O'Neill—CEO of ORCAA, a founder and board member of OCEAN, and author of Weapons of Math Destruction and The Shame Machine. The presentation will take place in Hall E, downstairs at the Harvard Science Center, located at 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge. Elevator access is available for attendees who need it.

RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a copy of Coding Kids and pick it up at the event. Following the presentation will be a book signing.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

The inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America.

Fourth graders doing Google-branded coding lessons. Amazon schooling seventh graders on its warehouse robots. Advanced Placement computing courses from Microsoft and Apple. Many educators and parents would object if Exxon wrote their school’s climate curriculum—or if schools assigned nutrition lessons from Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. Yet today, tech giants influence nearly every step of the education supply chain. They provide the classroom devices and software many students use to do assignments. They sell schools on the latest artificial intelligence tools. And increasingly, tech companies are launching their own corporate-branded school curricula, shaping how and what millions of children learn.

In recent years, the tech industry has helped spread computer science and AI education in schools at astonishing speed and scale. In Coding Kids, award-winning New York Times journalist Natasha Singer draws on a decade of reporting to reveal how tech titans used the promise of coding (high-paying jobs! change the world!) to weave rosy industry visions of technology into the very fabric of American education, sometimes sidelining crucial ideas like civics and critical thinking. Along the way, Singer takes readers through the powerful playbook Big Tech used to scale coding lessons nationwide. Then she shows readers how tech companies are now applying the same playbook to mainstream their AI tools in schools.

A revelatory account of the powerful forces shaping education and our kids’ futures, Coding Kids also offers hope. It tells the compelling stories of pioneering teachers fighting for a broader vision of tech education—one that not only teaches kids algorithms and app-making, but also asks students to grapple with the societal impacts of tech giants and their disruptive digital tools.

Natasha Singer has covered tech industry influence in schools for the New York Times for more than a decade. Her school tech reporting helped prompt California to enact a landmark student online data protection law. In 2019, she was part of a Times team whose tech coverage won a George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Photo Credit: Bella Wang Photography

Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard and worked as a math professor at Barnard College before switching over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene. In 2016 she wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy, and in 2022 she wrote The Shame Machine: who profits in the new age of humiliation. She is the CEO of ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company and a founder and board member of OCEAN, a non-profit defending the public interest against algorithmic harm.

The Harvard Science Book Talks series is a collaboration between the Harvard University Division of Science, the Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store. The series features talks by the authors of recently published books on a variety of science-related topics and is open to both the Harvard community and to the general public. Learn more and watch recordings of past talks here.