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Life is Tech leverages AWS to create a digital education environment for middle and high school students to learn programming
Life is Tech wants to create an environment in which teachers and students in every region of Japan can concentrate on education and apply themselves to learning. It's consistent with Amazon’s leadership principles, which are based on the happiness of all customers.
Yuji Okuzono
VPoE
Life is Tech, Inc.
Supporting a new IT subject with programming materials tailored to learning guidelines
Over 52,000 learners to date have used Life is Tech’s original educational courses—which starts with programming basics—in classrooms, online lessons, and intensive camps.
With a shortage of IT personnel contributing to Japan’s decline in international competitiveness, the Japanese government has revised teaching guidelines for infotech education. From 2022, Informatics 1 will be a mandatory subject in high school, and Informatics will appear in university entrance tests from 2025.
“Integrating and strengthening information usage abilities in public education is immensely meaningful,” says Yuji Okuzono, VPoE, Life is Tech. “However, the challenge is that Informatics 1 includes programming, so teaching staff must have appropriate skills.”
To support teachers in delivering IT education to middle and high school students, the company developed Life is Tech Lessons, educational material based on national guidelines for schools to teach programming. Over 1,650 schools have adopted these, with upward of 320,000 students using the solution.
Lessons range from the basics of text coding to creating original websites and developing web services using networks and AI. Teachers have the flexibility to design a syllabus into yearly schedules and daily lessons, so students can follow the content topic by topic, steadily understanding it as they learn.
Functions to manage course progress is another key facet. Teachers can conduct lessons and check students’ progress in real time, helping students who fall behind to keep up with national standards.
The Original Production feature—which uses the cloud to provide a development environment for each student—is particularly noteworthy. “Anyone can learn programming, AI, content creation, and other technologies on their own by going through the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle,” explains Okuzono. “But our environment enables students to actually create things and realize that digital technology can solve problems.”
Leveraging AWS and its outstanding reliability for information education in all environments
The Japanese government’s security policies for using digital material in schools include guidelines on the public cloud. Life is Tech selected AWS because of its outstanding reliability as a platform that complies with regulatory certification and its widespread adoption in government clouds.
Additionally, AWS is always one of the first providers to implement services with groundbreaking technologies such as AI, blockchain, and distributed ledgers. This proficiency attracted Life is Tech as it allows the company to incorporate these technologies into student learning as needed.
Life is Tech Lessons provide a ready-to-use development environment on the cloud for every student. By simply loading the environment at the beginning of the class, students are ready to learn.
“To learn programming, you need to set up the required environment,” says Okuzono. “However, if problems arose during setup, the time taken to resolve them eats into critical programming classes. Our goal is to provide an environment in which schools can devote themselves to teaching without being affected by technology literacy gaps or equipment issues.”
Supporting elective IT education to foster digital talent driving social change
Life is Tech will continue to provide higher value to schools while expanding lesson functionality. According to Okuzono, the company is examining progress check and follow-up mechanisms where AI can automatically detect students who are falling behind others, analyze their problems, and provide explanations and guidance.
Because Life is Tech believes it’s difficult to develop highly skilled talent through public education only, in 2022, the company launched Life is Tech! School X, a cross-school digital club for students wanting to go beyond the compulsory classes for which Life is Tech Lessons are designed. This unique initiative allows children from participating schools to network after Saturday lessons and learn brand new technology with their schoolmates and students from other schools.
Okuzono is keenly aware that resolving problems in IT education will lead to social reform in Japan: “Kids have only a small amount of time to focus on learning. Since IT literacy varies widely by region, providing educational equity is essential. Teachers involved in IT education have a tough job, but they have the greatest impact in the sense that children who understand digital technology will generate social change. The next three years or so will determine Japan’s success. I want to work with local government and education personnel so that in three years’ time, they can say, “We did it!”
