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Education Week
The National Science Foundation is offering grants of up to $300,000 each for projects that would help teacher-leaders get more exposure and improve STEM education systemwide. It's seeking ideas now. The submission process ends July 22. Details are laid out here. Proposals may include "novel STEM research opportunities," avenues for teachers to get involved in advisory and mentoring capacities, or international travel for research and education. NSF asks that the ideas be able to be piloted for up to two years. The goals are to find successful models for long-term programs that support teacher-leaders and to help those teachers serve as national resources to improve STEM education.
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Edutopia
There's been significant talk about "coding" lately — from the second annual "Hour of Code" event hosted in December by Code.org, to countries like Denmark and England incorporating computer programming into their curriculum. Here in the U.S., there are several ways in which computer programming activities support the Common Core State Standards. When students use tools such as Code Studio, Scratch, and Tynker, what they're doing is called programming. Programming is about the logic that goes into building a program. The blocks already exist — they just have to be placed in the correct order to get the program to work. This is the beginner level that most college computer programming students take.
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The Seattle Times
Washington state has allocated the funding necessary to begin a computer science education training program in high schools in the state. The state budget allocates $2 million for 2016-2017 to train high school teachers to teach computer science and set up computer science programs in some schools across the state. Washington state's funding is conditional on the funds matched by private donors, which sponsors of the program are confident they will get.
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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Gov. Asa Hutchinson touted computer science education opportunities in Arkansas during an economic development meeting. A survey initiative, Impact Independence County, that asks residents to identify Independence County's needs and create a plan to meet those needs was discussed and distributed at the meeting at Independence Hall on the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville campus. Hutchinson signed legislation in February that requires all Arkansas public and charter high schools to offer computer science courses beginning with the 2015-2016 school year.
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Slate
Carnegie Mellon University has a problem. It's a good one, this time — unlike when it lost dozens of researchers and scientists to Uber. The university's new problem is not one of lack but of excess: Too many students are interested in taking a popular computer science course, and there's not enough physical space in the classroom to accommodate them all. Rather than move the course to a football stadium, the Pittsburgh-based university plans to open the course up to more students by moving the majority of its instructional content from the classroom to the Internet. But it's not just uploading a series of lectures and calling it an online course.
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GeekWire
The University of Washington's Computer Science & Engineering Department is pressing ahead with plans for a second building on campus, despite a setback in the budget passed by the Washington state Legislature. The budget did include some good news for the tech industry, including an expansion of AP computer science courses and support for new K-12 education standards for computer science courses, in addition to providing scholarship funds for teachers to be trained in computer science education. Biotech did not fare as well, and the new budget also phases out the Life Sciences Discovery Fund.
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ChicagoInno
While diversity numbers released by major companies such as Facebook and Google show there is still a ways to go in diversifying the tech workforce, a summer camp at Illinois Institute of Technology has been quietly bringing more women into the STEM pipeline for the past five years. The Computer Discovery Camp at IIT, run by computer science professor Vida Winans, has been around since the summer of 2010 introducing and encouraging middle school girls to pursue STEM interests through coding, robotics, and engineering. Winans hopes that maintaining initiatives like these can offer girls the encouragement and extra skills they can't get elsewhere, changing the gender ratio one 7th and 8th grader at a time.
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The Framingham Tab
Local high school students in Framingham, Massachusetts, are running three camps this summer that they hope will spark girls' interest in computer science. The camps, run by the group CS Sparks, cover fashion, game design and story telling. "I would encourage girls to participate in any of the camps," said Kasandra Yee, a Framingham resident who goes to Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School in Marlborough and is running the fashion camp. "They'll be fun. You'll learn something you can take on forever."
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