IBM Will Feed Four Children For a Day For Every Student Who Masters the Mainframe

This week brings a special event honoring the IBM Z line of mainframes, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp: As part of this week's IBM Z Day event, looking-for-young-blood IBM is teaming up with tech-backed K-12 CS nonprofits Code.org and CSforALL and calling on students 14-and-up to Master The Mainframe during the 24-hour code-a-thon to open doors to new opportunities with Fortune 500 companies.

"The rewards for participants are substantial," explains Big Blue. "For every student who finishes Level 1, IBM will donate to the UN World Food Programme #ShareTheMeal... In celebration of IBM Z day, we will double the donation for all students that complete Master the Mainframe Level 1 between Sept 15 — 30 2020. Just 1 hour of your time will feed 4 children for a day." "Through three interactive Levels, you will access a mainframe and get skilled up on the foundations of Mainframe," according to IBM's announcement at MasterTheMainframe.com, "including JCL, Ansible, Python, Unix, COBOL, REXX, all through VS Code. Round it all out with a grand challenge where you craft your own fully-equipped Mainframe creation."

"One mainframe is equivalent to 1,500 x86 servers," the site notes. It also points out that mainframes handle 30 billion transactions every day, "more than the number of Google searches every day" — including 87% of all credit card transactions, nearly $8 trillion payments a year.