In his day job as the director of learning programs for Minecraft Education, Adam Tratt is out to inspire students and make sure they have the online tools to become the next generation of builders, thinkers, and storytellers.
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Over the weekend, Tratt and his wife Deborah Rappaport launched an effort to make sure students, specifically those at Seattle Public Schools, have the right hardware to continue their education during the shutdown of schools because of COVID-19.
In posts on social media, Tratt and Rappaport, who starts a new job next week as a senior program manager for Microsoft’s Azure, called for people to search their homes for any used laptops or tablets which could be donated to disadvantaged students in need of the devices so they could attend school remotely.
The call went out around the same time Washington State Schools Superintendent Chris Reykdal said in a video message delivered to families that he wasn’t so sure students would be returning to school this year — and on Monday, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee made that claim a reality saying distance learning would continue for the year. Amazon also announced on Monday that it was donating 8,200 laptops to SPS students and families in need.
“Nobody really knows exactly what’s going to happen and the need, especially for high school and middle school students, remains acute,” Tratt said Monday. “So my hypothesis is that in a city like Seattle where so many of us work in tech and so many of us have had a new laptop every two years for one reason or another, there are lots of perfectly good [machines] that are just sitting on people’s shelves collecting dust.”
In a Facebook post, Tratt said Windows 7 or later, 2013 MacBooks or later and iPads would all be helpful and he and Rappaport would facilitate pickup and delivery. They created a document for people to fill out detailing what equipment they could part with.
From a couple social media posts between he and his wife, Tratt said they probably got two dozen devices donated or committed thus far. Over the weekend he met with four students at an affordable housing project inside Magnuson Park. He said the straight-A students all came from families who recently immigrated to the United States.
“These kids are incredibly focused students. They started bantering with each other about who gets better grades. They’re awesome,” Tratt said. “They were exactly the kind of kids who have overcome dozens of challenges. And this is just a needless challenge. The fact that they’re now forced to try to keep up with school without a computer is absurd.”
Tratt, whose history in tech also includes being the co-founder and CEO of presentation software company Haiku Deck, is already plenty busy at Microsoft, where the Minecraft Education team is working “harder than ever” and where they recently launched free educational content to help students, parents and teachers at home.
But he said there are lots of people making huge sacrifices in the community right now, including putting their lives on the line to work in an emergency room, for instance. He called the donation drive a “tiny little effort” and a “win win” for anyone who needs to clean out a closet and help a kid go to school.
“It’s like a no brainer,” he said, before adding that the effort is not intended to be long term. He’s just trying to be scrappy and fill an immediate need, not start a nonprofit.
“A few people have asked us if we would take donations, and I don’t want to take donations away from organizations that already exist for the purpose of doing what we’re doing,” Tratt said. “I’m really just trying to put a tourniquet on the wound.”
