AMD offers new tools for teaching

Last week, AMD once again underscored their commitment to helping the next generation of geeks succeed, by unveiling two very large additions to their overall educational initiatives. The first was the announcement of the OpenCL University Kit. This free kit puts materials and information directly into the hands of any University-level educators who would like to offer a semester of OpenCL programming to their students. The OpenCL University Kit materials contain a 13 lecture series with full instructor and speaker notes, as well as code examples to help facilitate understanding of all the concepts presented. The course is written in such a way that students will only need a basic knowledge of C/C++ programming in order to grok. Students will additionally need access to a C/C++ compiler with OpenCL implementation, such as AMD’s APP SDK, which can be freely downloaded from the AMD site.

Later that day, AMD also announced the launch of the AMD Foundation. The idea is pretty simple—this foundation will combine with partners to help improve education in science, technology, engineering, math, and language arts skills. The first official action of the AMD Foundation is co-creating Level Up!, which is a joint project between AMD, Scholastic Inc. and the nonprofit Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. Level Up! offers a clever game design curricula for educators: The entire time students are actively engaged in developing their video game, they will also be learning writing, engineering, math, science, art, and more. Much like the OpenCL University initiative, the Level Up! materials are being offered to educators at no cost. Additionally, students from grades 7-12 who work through the Level Up! curricula and complete a game are encouraged to submit their designs to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for the chance to win some scholarship money or other prizes. Always useful with the rising cost of getting a college degree!

If you’re interested in more information, you can pop over to the AMD OpenCL University page, or the Level Up! page on the Scholastic main site. In either case, it’s always nice to see a large company like AMD taking an active interest in education.