Today, I’m excited to announce a collaboration between Geekwise Academy and Amazon Alexa. Geekwise Academy is an accelerated training program for current and aspiring technologists in Fresno, California. Geekwise Academy gives students in this area an opportunity to fulfill their dreams by way of providing the latest in technical training.
Since opening their doors in June 2013, Geekwise Academy has educated more than 3,500 students in the areas of robotics, video game design, web design, and application development. Starting July 25, Geekwise Academy students will be able to attend the first Amazon Alexa Skills Course in Fresno, California. During the four-week in-person training, students will learn about the Alexa Skills Kit to develop new voice user experiences called "skills" for Alexa. Alexa is the voice service that powers the popular Amazon Echo and other Alexa-enabled devices like the Amazon Echo Dot and Amazon Tap. Students will gain expertise in voice design and work on their own voice user interactions with the goal to get their Alexa skills live in the Alexa App upon certification.
The training program will cover various topics including setting up a development environment, building the interaction model of a skill, testing and debugging, using AWS Lambda for hosting source code, handling queries to third-party APIs, and connecting to custom hardware. A little bird (Geekwise Academy’s nerdy owl mascot) tells us there will be an exciting robotics project included in the Alexa curriculum!
The course will be held at Geekwise Academy within the Bitwise South Stadium technology hub in Downtown Fresno – home to over 100 technology companies. Sessions will run three hours per day, five days a week, for four weeks.
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“We are extremely excited to offer our community the first-ever Geekwise Academy Alexa skills course. It will give students a glimpse into the future of the technology industry and afford them an opportunity to design, imagine and create. This program has the potential to transform the lives of our students, our community, and our regional economy by exposing individuals to game-changing technology that will impact every industry and household on the planet.” – Bethany E. Mily, Executive Director of Education at Geekwise Academy.
Learn more about Geekwise Academy and register now for the Amazon Alexa Skills Course starting on July 25.
-Marion