I was pleasantly surprised when I read the transcript of Mayor Bloomberg's state of the city address last week. After reading through the expected education coverage regarding state test scores and teacher evaluation, I came across the mayor’s remarks describing how Fred Wilson and an NYC teacher in collaboration with the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) are opening a Software Academy.Working in education over the last few years has piqued my interest about how schools and districts think about incorporating technology education into schools. I’m not referencing projects like one laptop per child or School of One, where the emphasis has been on implementing new hardware or software in classrooms. Rather, I'm talking about the technology education that provides students with the opportunity to devise solutions to real world problems by; conducting a needs assessment, reflecting on how technology could provide relief and then, design, test and implement a solution. I’m passionate about this kind of technology education because participation in computer and information science courses helped me to develop and hone unique skills that I’ve used at every juncture in my career.For whatever reason, my parents put me into a computer class at the age of 7. I loved the experience and still remember the satisfaction of "painting" colors across the screen and knowing that I had written some commands to make it happen. (My favorite color was a cross between fuchsia and mauve). I didn't really encounter programming again until I was 14. In the interim, I made up for it by playing games, learning all about America Online (AOL) and mastering Microsoft Office 3.1 and beyond. Prompted by my older sister's experiences with the famed computer /French teacher and my own interest, I signed up for computer science as my freshman elective. I was one of two girls in the class. In those days, we still had to boot the computers up, disk A, then disk B, and input some commands to start up our machines.But it was there in that small room jammed with computers and a large conference table (which is now reminiscent of many of the developer spaces I’ve been in) is where I learned about the value of flowcharts, about infinite loops and recursion, about bubble sorts and much more. It was such an empowering experience to take inputs and constraints, various solution paths and newly learned code and transform it into a working function and then to press F5 to "Run" the code and see our creation come alive.It was my also my high school teacher who spoke to us about majoring in computer science and introduced me to what would become my alma mater. I applied after hearing that it was a good school for computer science and that they were interested in creating more opportunities for women. My years at CMU, especially the last two that were wholly focused on design and development helped me to become a different kind of thinker. Since then, anytime I interact with technology, be it an ATM, the credit card machine at the grocery checkout, or an app on my iPhone, I look at it as a system of inputs and outputs and always find myself wondering "how does this work?" There were two ideas from my undergraduate studies that have stayed with me, both imparted by the head of our program at the time, Dr.Weinberg; first - software development was all about people, process and technology and second - technology will continue to evolve but the ability to problem solve and think strategically is something that will transcend time. He was right. My career to date has taken me into the private, non-profit and public sectors and regardless of the context, I have been able to draw on the approach to solutions development that I learned and practiced from a young age.So, when I hear about a new campus that will be built to center around this kind of thinking, I'm exhilarated. There is so much opportunity for students to learn about solutions development within the context of technology versus the "technology in the classroom" approach. Students will be exposed to a whole host of challenges and ways to approach them that are different than other subjects. Software development is layered - students will interpret a problem and perhaps conduct a needs assessment, in doing so they will learn the context and then they will need to understand the technology (the data systems, the software, the front end, the user experience, etc.) to implement the solution. The will internalize the mantra: design, build, test and repeat . The opportunities are endless and this is the kind of learning that is directly connected to college and career readiness. No standardized test can ever compare.