I’ll take a contrary opinion here - this seems like mostly a good thing to me. When I was in high school, the course of my life was significantly impacted by a

I’ll take a contrary opinion here - this seems like mostly a good thing to me. When I was in high school, the course of my life was significantly impacted by a company doing something very much like this. In 1999 there were about 300 kids K-12 enrolled in my small rural school, and Intergraph largely paid for a new computer lab and program. They included a frankly silly amount of hardware and software: ~25 workstations, two of which were dedicated to GIS work and one of which was for CAD/CAM. There were survey-grade GPS units, Microstation J for CAD, Geomedia and ArcGIS for GIS, 3DS Max, Maya, and Solid Edge for 3D modeling… you get the idea. The best part was that it was one of the first times they’d done this, so the program basically consisted of them delivering everything to an unused classroom in the gym and driving off. I ended up jumping at the chance to play with any and all of those things I could. I spent the summer putting together the lab. I spent more time at school that summer than I ever did during the actual school year; I was involved in everything from carpentry to hardware installation. About half way through the following school year they sent a couple of representatives to observe the classes, and we were asked to present a project that we’d been working on using the lab. My project involved using the GPS/GIS stuff to accurately map a hiking trail in a nearby town, make graphics to illustrate the idea, and provide cost estimates for a couple of different options for the path itself (dirt, gravel, pavement). By the end of the second year, what had started as “give some money and tech to a school and see what happens” had grown into a non-profit in coordination with the state college. That group pick 2-3 kids from each of the ~5 schools that were involved then to travel to Lahaina, Maui to give them a jumpstart on getting their own lab together. I was one of those kids, and spent two weeks in Hawaii on their dime to install a second computer lab and basically just be a resource for the teachers there while they figured out what they were supposed to do. They sent me to my first teach conference: the Intergraph Graphics Users Group (“IGUG”). I got to fly in a Chinook helicopter simulator, got a ton of swag, and generally just got to spend three or four days just geeking out with professional nerds. I can honestly say that Intergraph - and the EAST Initiative that grew from that initial grant - directly changed the course of my life with a program that sounds a lot like the one in the article. They even paid to paint the floor their “signature purple”.