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CSTA
These days it seems like "how to learn coding yourself" opportunities are everywhere. There are MOOCs from major universities, code.org has great online tutorials, Facebook just opened a website called TechPrep to help parents and students alike find resources and tools, and there seems to be a new edtech company starting up every week with online CS resources. The question for many becomes "do we still need computer science teachers?"
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The Wall Street Journal (commentary)
Gary Beach, a contributor for The Wall Street Journal, writes: "The more computer science education makes the news, the more apparent it is how far we still need to go. My original intent for this column was to write a piece about how high profile student coding efforts like Code.Org's 'Hour of Code', and Sheryl Sandberg's 'Lean in Circles' were making progress encouraging young Americans to begin to understand the field of computer science. I also saw an opportunity to encourage chief information officer to sponsor an 'Hour of Code' program in their hometown during Computer Science Education Week."
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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 pool of test-takers for the Advanced Placement computer science exam is still overwhelmingly white and male, according to data from the College Board, which administers the AP tests. The number of students taking the AP computer science exam increased by about 24 percent from last year, up to 46,000 U.S. students, according to numbers released this fall. That's less growth than the exam showed the year before (it was up about 26 percent then), but still more growth than any other AP course except physics. Maryland was the state with the most test-takers overall by population.
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Kids,Code, and Computer Science
Board games and card games are some of the best ways to learn about programming. You don't need a computer. Play as a family or group. Here are fun board games and card games for little kids, bigger kids and families. Playing these games as a family with younger kids also can help them more quickly understand the games, more than if they were to play by themselves. And don't forget, in addition to board games and card games created to teach programming and computer science, look up chess, Go, Backgammon and other traditional games which are fun to play and teach problem solving and strategy skills.
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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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Edutopia (commentary)
Douglas Kiang, a contributor for Edutopia, writes: "We teach kids how to write by first immersing them in stories and literature. We should adopt this same approach to teach coding and programming. In fact, this is something I already do: giving every child a background in coding that allows those who are interested and motivated to proceed with programming at a higher level. My students make apps for iPhone and iPad and put them up on the App Store. Building a well-designed app can be daunting and time-consuming, requiring programming knowledge as well as user interface and user experience methodologies. That's why we engage our students from the start in a process of designing apps to help others — a process in which coding and programming are essential, but secondary to developing empathy and process-oriented design skills."
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VentureBeat
In recent years, a growing number of coding boot camps have helped address the large gap between available software engineering positions and qualified candidates to fill them. Coding bootcamps have been so successful that observers have wondered whether these programs are beginning to replace traditional college computer science degrees. For example, Aaron Skonnard, the CEO of Pluralsight, argues in Edtech's Next Big Disruption Is The College Degree that college degrees will be replaced by "a new array of modern credentials that are currently gaining mainstream traction as viable measures of learning, ability and accomplishment."
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The Tennessean
Kofi Patterson could some day be your boss. At 14 years old, he's still working on the business plan. But the goal is to head his own tech company. "I want to start my business doing computer programming," Patterson, a student at Nashville's RePublic High School, said during an early October visit to the school. Although the idea behind Patterson's prospective business is still a work in progress, RePublic is ensuring the teen has the knowledge to make his dream happen. Every student passing through the school's doors must enroll in Advanced Placement Computer Science. The plan from the Nashville charter school's leaders is to have its almost 170 students at the school take the advanced placement test in 2017. Most of the students are black, and a good number are female — populations that statewide, and nationally, are underrepresented on the test.
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The Christian Science Monitor
On the projector screen, in front of an animated house, several figures are constantly in motion. A cat and a bear pop in and out of the frame, as a dancing Batman and a cartoon representation of the rapper Snoop Dogg glide forward, stopping momentarily before darting backward. Sitting at tables around the screen, the 9th grade students at Dearborn STEM Academy in Boston watch the dancing figures closely. At first, it looks like an animated movie. But then the class’s teacher, Jonathan LoPorto, opens a new tab, revealing rows of multicolored blocks in Scratch, the computer programming software that controls the figures, known as sprites.
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