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"During this year's Computer Science Education Week (specifically on Dec 11th), I saw the other side of "The Hour of Code" campaign. Many schools around the world are beginning to include computer science and programming instruction in their math and language arts classes. At my school, we also saw the inclusion of some great discussion about narrative and story in our computer science special event."

"Yes, National Computer Science Week is over and more than 10 million students participated in the Hour of Code and the feedback from all over the country is pretty incredible. Chicago Public Schools announced they are adding Computer Science into the core curriculum for all students. Schools and districts that have been promoting coding for years, like Los Altos School District, are getting great press about what they accomplish with students. New apps, programs and teacher training resources are popping up all over. 2014 definitely feels like it is going to be the year of the student coder!"

"Unfortunately, the strength in the talent pipeline that we see in female soccer today is not the reality for technology. The U.S. is facing a shortage of Computer Science (CS) graduates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, every year there are close to 140,000 jobs requiring a CS degree, but only 40,000 U.S. college graduates major in CS, which means that 100,000 positions go unfilled by domestic talent. Even more dramatic is that women in U.S. colleges and universities earn only 18 percent of CS degrees. In middle school, 74 percent of girls express interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), but when choosing a college major, only 0.4 percent of high school girls select computer science. The true potential of future innovation will only become a reality if more women are part of it. A rich, diverse community of innovators is key for new technologies to address the needs of modern society. That is why Microsoft YouthSpark - a global initiative to create opportunities for all youth to learn computing - supports Girls Who Code, a national nonprofit organization that aims to close the gender gap in technology in the U.S."

"Hour of Code is a week-long promotion of the teaching and learning of computer coding. "The Hour of Code is designed to demystify code and show that computer science is not rocket-science, anybody can learn the basics," said Hadi Partovi, founder and CEO of Code.org. "In one week last year, 15 million students tried an Hour of Code. Now we're aiming for 100 million worldwide to prove that the demand for relevant 21st century computer science education crosses all borders and knows no boundaries.""

"Computer science is a primary driver of the U.S. economy, yet it does not (yet) play a significant role in K-12 education. Did you know that only 27 states allow students to count computer science courses toward high school graduation? But there's a way schools can help--by getting involved in Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek). CSEdWeek and Hour of Code arrive December 7-13th, and this annual event is bigger than ever. Below, you will find a resource guide for CSEdWeek and Hour of Code, in order to help all of you K-12 educators bring coding into the classroom."

"This course is targeted to middle school grades 6-8 (ages 11-14 years). It is also written for teachers who may not have a Computer Science background, or who may be teaching an "Intro to Computer Science" course for the first time. This course takes approximately 14 weeks to complete, spending about 1 week on each of the first 11 lessons, and 3 weeks for students to complete the final project at the end. Of course, teachers should feel free to customize the curriculum to meet individual school or district resources and timeframe."

"Coding and computer science have yet to make their way into every school curriculum in the U.S. But the country isn't short on initiatives-such as Google's Code Next program or the White House's Obama era Computer Science For All campaign-which aim to change that. And while these programs attempt to arm students will the ability to code, they sometimes overlook a critical skill that developers, computer science scholars and tech recruiters say is key to landing a job in their field: writing."

"As defined by Jeannette Wing, computational thinking is "a way of solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts of computer science." To the students at my school, it's an approach to tackling challenging questions and ambiguous puzzles. We explicitly integrate computational thinking into all of our classes, allowing students to draw parallels between what they're learning and how they're approaching problems across all disciplines. Our students rely on four computational thinking skills, as well as a set of essential attitudes"

"This post is a summary of an article submitted to the Learning Partnership for use in their monthly newsletter Spark. To read the full article, please visit: https://bit.ly/2pERWIG  Computational Thinking (CT) and the use of computer programming (often referred to as "coding") to support math instruction has gained momentum in recent years. CT has many definitions but most researchers agree that it "involves the use of computer science concepts such as abstraction, debugging, remixing and iteration to solve problems" (Brennan & Resnick; Ioannidou, Bennett, Repenning, Koh, & Basawapatna; Wing as cited in Lye & Koh, 2013).   There are many "potentials" for using computer programming as a context for the development of CT in the mathematics classroom, four of which I've listed below:"

"Math matters for computer science because it teaches students how to use abstract language, work with algorithms, self-analyze their computational thinking, and accurately modeling real-world solutions."

"According to Code.org, 90 percent of U.S. schools are not teaching any computer science. Eyebrows were raised in 2013 as the U.K. passed a plan to educate every child how to code. In 2014, Barack Obama made history as the first U.S. president to program a computer. Yet critics claim that often only the more affluent schools offer computer science courses, thus denying minorities potential to learn the skills required by the 1.4 million new jobs that will be created during the next ten years. In my opinion, parents of every student in every school at every level should demand that all students be taught how to code. They don't need this skill because they'll all go into it as a career -- that isn't realistic -- but because it impacts every career in the 21st century world. Any country recognizing that will benefit in the long term. Here's how you can start. With the following resources, you can teach programming with every student and every age."

"I am aware that the computer science aspects of the new computing curriculum creates extra work for some teachers as they need to learn many unfamiliar concepts. I know this can be challenging and time consuming, but I think we are very fortunate because there is a vast range of free programming environments /apps available for teachers to use for teaching computer science elements to children. What we need to remember is that the program itself doesn't just make children develop computational thinking, the context we use, the pedagogical approach we employ shapes the learning experience of our students. On the next page I have shared a simple activity which can be used as a main task or as an assessment task at the end of a coding session. The aim is to support children to design solutions for a specific purpose by selecting and using correct blocks in a sequence. These activities can encourage them to think in logical steps which is the main foundation of problem solving skills and at the same time provide opportunities for peer or whole class discussions."

"How do you ensure students who excel at math remain engaged? Heidi Williams intended to solve that challenge by starting an after-school coding club while she was a gifted-and-talented teacher at Bayside Middle School near Milwaukee. Instead of using pen and paper, her students created an interactive children's book on Scratch, the MIT Media Lab coding suite that lets users create games, stories and simulations. And the more of this kind of coding activity they did, the better their math test scores got. Now a computer science curriculum specialist at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Williams researches this correlation. One possibility is that the computational thinking skills developed while coding help students break down complicated problems-on and off computers, she says."

"To help fill this gap in K-12 STEM education, Harvey Mudd created its first MOOC for middle and high school teachers. Middle Years Computer Science (MyCS) walks a teacher through the lesson plans, activities and exercises of a curriculum developed to appeal to students with a broad range of interests and no prior CS experience. Schools that have been using it have found it to be easy to use, accessible and engaging for their students. Our second MOOC offering, How Stuff Moves, supports students in their first course in calculus-based physics, a fundamental building block to further physics study in college. The course provides lectures, demonstrations, problem sets, worked solutions to every practice problem and concept tests- a wealth of resources to help students master the material, whether they are considering taking a high school AP physics course or their first mechanics course in college."

"When educator Lynn Koresh hears from kids that they want a career doing something with computers, she asks, "To do what with computers?" Adults often encourage kids to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills, and computing classes are usually a first stop. But Koresh knows it's the real-world applications of computational thinking and coding language skills that bring such knowledge to life. She reasoned that most middle school students are already playing video games and might respond well to a unit on how to design, create, test and promote video games. Along the way, she's also teaching them about digital citizenship and entrepreneurship. "I wanted to give kids exposure to what it means to have a career using computers," said Koresh, technology coordinator at Edgewood Campus School in Madison, Wisconsin."

""Why does this matter?" Teachers are often called upon to answer this question about an academic subject, and computer science instructors may face this demand more frequently than most. Learning to write lines of code can seem, to many students, like a pointless exercise in tedium. But a few professors of computer science have a compelling reply at the ready. They are participants in the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software project, known as HFOSS-or, more grandly, Software for Humanity. Why does this matter? these professors might respond. Because it's helping to feed needy people in Haiti, or to deliver supplies to earthquake survivors in China, or to manage the medical care of malaria victims in Rwanda."

"In "The Beauty and Joy of Computing," the course he helped conceive for nonmajors at the University of California, Berkeley, Daniel Garcia explains an all-important concept in computer science - abstraction - in terms of milkshakes."

"Computer Science for All reflects the Obama administration's concerns that an economy based mostly on high-tech industries will exacerbate wage and income inequality unless a more diverse talent pipeline can be created. Here are the reasons why the initiative is about more than simply teaching more people how to code:"

"Prepare for the AP Computer Science A exam with a full suite of practice programs and multiple choice quizzes"

"The Foos is part of a trend toward increasing emphasis on code as a fundamental literacy. You may have heard about the Hour of Code nonprofit initiative, which claims tens of millions of student participants; or New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio's recent announcement that he intends to require teaching of computer science in all grades for all students. "A computer science education is literacy for the 21st century," the mayor said at the announcement. Educators, researchers and entrepreneurs like Hosford are taking that analogy very seriously. They're arguing that the basic skills of coding, such as sequencing, pattern recognition and if/then conditional logic, should be introduced alongside or even before traditional reading, writing and math."