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eSchool News
Though the technology industry is booming, especially in Washington, only about one in four high schools nationwide teach computer science. Many local and national efforts are hoping to close that gap. In its last term, the Legislature passed a bill that will use $2 million in state and private funds to train high school teachers to teach computer science and to set standards and teacher training programs for 2016-2017. And in the past few weeks, Microsoft also expanded its own program, which now is operating in nearly 60 Washington schools.
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Calling all hackers, coders, and technical high school women and the educators who support them! Applications for the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Award for Aspirations in Computing and the NCWIT Educator Award are now open!
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Education Week
The STEM Education Act of 2015, which expands the definition of STEM — an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — to include computer science programs, was signed into law yesterday. The bill that became the STEM Education Act was introduced in the House of Representatives by Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, and Elizabeth Esty, a Democrat from Conneticut, both members of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. The new law does not add funding, but it does expand the kinds of STEM programs that can be run and funded by federal government agencies to include computer science.
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EdTech Magazine
Two professors will delve into the privacy issues resulting from the data-based training technique known as "deep learning," courtesy of a grant from Google. Pennsylvania State University's Adam Smith, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, and Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science and a visiting faculty member at Cornell Tech, will investigate the chinks in the armor of deep learning — that is, using algorithms to model high-level abstractions in data.
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IEEE TryComputing.org offers free educator resources to help students build computing skills and explore computing careers. Find a wide range of interactive computing lesson plans for students ages 8-18. Lessons topics include programming, concurrency, networking, encryption, artificial intelligence, and more! All lesson plans are aligned to national education standards.
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Samsung for Education
As schools adopt mobile technology at an unprecedented pace, the need for best-in-class mobile devices, support and services is growing rapidly. Samsung Mobile is committed to supporting mobile-first initiatives, offering a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise solutions.
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LA Observed
This is a milestone for Silicon Valley and for higher education in America, precisely because it has apparently never been true before. The most popular major for female students at Stanford University to declare this academic year is computer science. It's Stanford's most popular major overall, but that hasn't been true for women there or possibly any place else. The reticence of women to study computer science and the STEM sciences in general at top universities has long been known; the previous number one major for women at Stanford had been human biology.
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Slash Gear
Recently, New York City announced plans to add computer science classes to all of its public schools over the next decade. Chicago's mayor is taking that a step further, calling for coding classes to be a national graduation requirement — under such a mandate, all students would have to take such classes to get their high school diploma. Of course, such a mandate would likely end up being very burdensome for school districts. The call was made by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who made the proposal this past Thursday. He pointed out that kids need to have this knowledge to thrive in the present and future world. Chicago itself already has plans in place to get its high schoolers on the coding path, moving to have computer science sources as a graduation requirement.
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Brookings
Recently, New York City's Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all of the city's public schools will be required to teach a computer science curriculum within 10 years. The city joins Chicago and San Francisco in requiring public schools to teach the subject. These efforts to teach information technology are coming at an important time: Relative to a bachelor's degree, the value of a high school diploma has plummeted in recent decades. Mean earnings for high school diploma-only holders were 24 percent less than bachelor's degree-only holders in 1980; now the gap is 56 percent. Given what we know about the economic value of computer science and other science, technology, engineering and math skills, offering these skills in high school would help close the gap.
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EdSurge (commentary)
Blake Montgomery, a contributor for EdSurge, writes: "When I talked to Gene Luen Yang, he was on a book tour for his latest novel, 'Secret Coders.' He had just finished giving a demonstration, which, he said, 'always gets gasps from the audience.' He had been using a computer program to draw squares on a screen then rotate them to create a star. Most novelists don't write code. Still fewer teach it. But Yang is a rarity: a nationally renowned writer with a techie past and an endless appetite for education. Decades ago, he learned Logo, a now-archaic programming language best known for its 'turtle graphics' that facilitate rudimentary drawing. On his monitor and in his comics, Logo lives on, delighting students with its starbursts and pulling them into a new world."
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