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CSTA
No one can doubt that it is an exciting and busy time to be a K-12 computer science educator: an announcement from the White House about the new CS for All initiative, a new K-12 CS Framework under construction, an emphasis on cybersecurity education in the K-12 classroom, new curriculum products, new computer science standards in Arkansas, Florida, and Massachusetts (to name a few states), computer science for all New York City students, and professional development opportunities for CS educators. Scarcely a day goes by in the news/media without some mention of K-12 computer science education and what it should look like.
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NPR
President Barack Obama wants kids to learn to code. So much so, he's pledged billions of dollars to teach them. "Now we have to make sure all our kids are equipped for the jobs of the future – which means not just being able to work with computers, but developing the analytical and coding skills to power our innovation economy," he said in his radio address on Jan. 30. And adults are looking to learn, too. Coding academies, or "boot camps," are cropping up across the country, promising to teach students to code in a few months or even a few weeks. But computers are not just about coding. There's also a lot of theory — and science — behind technology. And those theoretical concepts form the basis of much of computer science education in colleges and universities.
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Re/code
It's easy to mistake computer science for programming, and Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi says that even the kids who will never work for Google or Microsoft should be educated in digital literacy. Partovi joined Re/code Executive Editor Kara Swisher on the latest episode of "Re/code Decode," where he argued that we should start imparting the basics of computer science to kids in elementary school.
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The Huffington Post
Bill Gates wrote his first computer program in 1968 when he was 13 years old. It was a game of tic-tac-toe that allowed people to play against the computer. For the first time, he was able to get a machine to execute his commands perfectly. He felt an invigorating feeling of power and agency that he never experienced before. The Mothers Club at his school had purchased a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and some time on a GE computer. In those days computers were hard to come by, and getting time was expensive. Bill and his friends hacked the system to get free computer time. When they were caught and banned, the company that they hacked actually hired them to find bugs in exchange for computer time.
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The Wall Street Journal
Allison Cuttler, a computer science teacher in Newark, New Jersey, has earned recognition for her students' success with the subject. Last spring, all of her students who took the Advanced Placement exam passed.
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Edutopia (commentary)
Heather Wolpert-Gawron, a contributor for Edutopia, writes: "So it seems I'm writing a blog post series. In my first one — What the Heck Is Project-Based Learning? — I explored the simple elevator speech and basic elements that describe a PBL unit. In my second post in this series — What the Heck is OER? — I developed criteria to determine the value of all the free online stuff that's out there for educators. So for this, let's take a look at all the current hoopla surrounding 3D printing."
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Jaxenter
Students' interest in computer science has skyrocketed in the past couple of years, but the demand for software engineers still exceeds the supply. One of the reasons could be the fact that CS is very hard and many students abandon the idea after they encounter several bumps in the road. However, one can succeed in obtaining a CS education by following a set of steps.
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BU Today
Computer science has long been a popular subject on campus — but not like it is today. Enrollment in the program at BU has more than quadrupled over the past five years. "It's popular in a totally unprecedented way," says Mark Crovella, a College of Arts & Sciences professor and chair of computer science. Interest had previously peaked in 2000, he says, "and we have blown way, way past that." Back at the turn of the century, when AOL was hot and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was still in prep school, there were 368 computer science majors at BU. A decade and one economic meltdown later, in spring 2010, the number had dropped to 115. Since then, numbers have been upward bound. This semester there are 487 computer science majors, more than four times the 2010 number.
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U.S. News & World Report
The budget released by President Barack Obama calls for a $4 billion initiative to expand access to K-12 computer science. We appreciate the president's recognition of this issue and are proud to say our states are leading the nation in expanding access to this critical subject. In fact, our states are already leading a wave within the nation to bring computer science into our schools. Only 1 in 4 schools in the U.S. teach computer science, but 90 percent of parents are demanding access for their children. It's clear that we need to expand computer science instruction, and we can.
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ACM, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. CSTA appreciates ACM's ongoing support!
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