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Education DIVE
Not too long ago, ACM and CSTA released a study that found computer science education was on the decline. Published in 2010, the report, titled "Running on Empty: The Failure to Teach K-12 Computer Science in the Digital Age," found that the number of high schools offering introductory computer science courses had declined 17 percent between 2005 and 2009. Universities and tech companies had begun to worry publicly about a growing gap between the number of jobs available and the number of people who might be ready to fill them.
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The Columbus Dispatch
Free rent and groceries were selling points, but college freshman Aishwarya Mandyam was more excited about the chance to connect with like-minded women when she moved into the eight-bedroom house offered by a Seattle software startup. "There's inspiration. There's tech support," said the computer-science major, who is interested in a career that combines medicine and technology. Mandyam and seven other women are sharing a 3,100-square-foot home, rent-free, blocks from the University of Washington. TUNE, a software startup that provides technology for marketers, is paying the rent for the house with the goal of creating a supportive community for female university students interested in computer science and technology.
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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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Tampa Bay Times
Sunlake High School sophomore Chris Collins sees little value in his Spanish language courses. "I was bored out," said Collins, 15. "If I want to travel in the future, I'd probably want to learn the language. I'm not planning to travel." He much prefers learning the syntax and structure of computer programming, a foundation for the burgeoning international technology trade. "Why can't code be a language?" he wondered. "I think it should." State Sen. Jeremy Ring, a Margate Democrat who made his fortune as a Yahoo executive, aims to make it so.
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Granite Geek
If New Hampshire wants to get more females interested in computer science, they'd better get cracking, judging from high schoolers' interest: For every N.H. girl who took the AP exam in computer science last May, 7.47 boys took it. That 7.47-to-1 ratio is by far the biggest gender disparity among subjects in the AP exam, according to data released by the College Board. On the flip side, for every N.H. boy who took the AP exam in drawing, 4.54 girls took it. Overall, the difference among topics fits gender stereotyping: The more geeky (mathematically speaking) it was, the more boys and/or fewer girls were drawn to it. In the sciences, not surprisingly to anybody who goes to college, girls were over-represented in biology and environmental science, boys over-represented in physics. Chemistry was pretty evenly split.
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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
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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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The Conversation
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced that the city is investing $81 million to establish computer science instruction in every public school in the city by 2025. This announcement is impressive, but hardly surprising to those of us who have been watching the computer science education landscape evolve rapidly over the last eight years. Interest in computer science at the university level declined after the "dot-com bust" of 2000, but then came back with a vengeance in 2007. Since then, student enrollment in computer science has been increasing.
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eSchool News
STEM education, while always a national focus, is receiving more attention in recent days, as surveys and legislation reveal awareness of its importance to the nation's success. Three out of four Americans in a recent survey said they think "science is cool in a way that it wasn't 10 years ago." Seventy-three percent of participants in the Finger on the Pulse opinion survey, from Horizon Media's WHY Group, agreed with the statement that "in the future, all the best jobs will require knowledge of computer coding languages."
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The Christian Science Monitor
A lack of diversity is something that has bedeviled Silicon Valley for years, fueling a series of lawsuits alleging the industry can be unfairly competitive and even inhospitable for women and people of color. Recently, Facebook announced a new website that aims to tackle that problem by engaging parents, particularly of students of color. The site, TechPrep, aims to provide parents with basic information and resources about computer programming and coding so they can encourage their children to pursue those careers.
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Language Magazine
Some states have proposed and passed legislation introducing coding into school curriculum. This past May, Arkansas passed a comprehensive law requiring all public and charter schools to offer computer science courses and New Mexico and Kentucky have proposed similar legislation. However, a newly proposed policy in Florida appears to be the first that would allow languages to be fully replaced with coding. A survey by Oraco Technology in the U.K. announced that Python overtook French as the most popular language learned in primary schools and that six out of ten parents would rather have their children learn to program than learn French. The description of both subjects as languages is suggestive of an academic overlap. However, while programming and linguistics do share certain aspects, as Amy Hirotka from code.org says, "We still believe [coding] is fundamentally different than a world language."
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U.S. Department of Education
The U.S. Department of Education is awarding more than $3 million in new awards to 13 colleges and universities that serve large minority populations to strengthen education programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics through the Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program. MSEIP grants are three-year awards that support a variety of activities, including: the development of pre-college enrichment activities in science; tutoring and enhancement of research skills in science education for students; faculty training to develop specific science research or education skills; curriculum development in STEM fields; renovation of STEM labs/classrooms; and any other activities designed to address specific barriers to the entry of minorities into STEM disciplines.
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