Group items tagged

Educators have been tapping into the wildly popular online game Minecraft for its potential as a learning tool for a while now - to teach physics, math, and computer science. But until recently, the game was mostly the territory of computer science teachers, and even they were forced to use the commercial version of the online game. So a few months ago, two teachers, Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin, decided to make the software more accessible and relevant to teachers. They joined forces to found MinecraftEdu and started offering discounted educator licenses to Minecraft.

Google has said it will cough up funds to train (British) computer science teachers.

"Online Python Tutor is a free educational tool that helps students overcome a fundamental barrier to learning programming: understanding what happens as the computer executes each line of a program's source code. Using this tool, a teacher or student can write a Python program directly in the web browser and visualize what the computer is doing step-by-step as it executes the program."

Online Python Tutor is a free educational tool that helps students overcome a fundamental barrier to learning programming: understanding what happens as the computer executes each line of a program's source code. Using this tool, a teacher or student can write a Python program directly in the web browser and visualize what the computer is doing step-by-step as it executes the program.

"To inspire the next generation of [Tim Berners-Lee]s and Ada Lovelaces, we need to excite children about the art, as well as the science, of computing"

Seeking K-12 teachers for study on learning App Inventor http://t.co/2c4Y487J via @zite

"An exciting initiative for students and teachers to develop digital literacy skills on YouTube and across the wider web in a few short lessons. To take part, go to http://www.google.com/edu/ytcurric or http://www.youtube.com/teachers"

Digital citizenship is a key component of the technology and media literacy. We should not only teach our students how to be  good citizens in the real physical world  but how they can be good netizens of the online world  as well.

Last week Doug Peterson pointed me to an article called "Let's not call it computer science if we really mean computer programming." My initial reaction was "Let's not call it computer programming if we really mean software engineering."  Really the author was talking more about the difference between CS and SE than much else.The ACM has a great Computing Careers web site which lists a number of computing fields and degrees. I recommend this series to teachers and guidance councilors all the time. They list five different degree paths:

Last week Doug Peterson pointed me to an article called "Let's not call it computer science if we really mean computer programming." My initial reaction was "Let's not call it computer programming if we really mean software engineering."  Really the author was talking more about the difference between CS and SE than much else.The ACM has a great Computing Careers web site which lists a number of computing fields and degrees. I recommend this series to teachers and guidance councilors all the time. They list five different degree paths:

Computer Science Teacher: Call for Proposals Annual CSTA Conference 2013 - http://t.co/79XlZCAd via @Shareaholic

RT @alfredtwo: Computer Science Teacher: Vampire Numbers and other Interesting Things http://t.co/EFWcD2oi

"We have devised an interactive curriculum aimed to support teachers of secondary students (approximately ages 13-17). The curriculum helps educate students on topics like: YouTube's policies How to report content on YouTube How to protect their privacy online How to be responsible YouTube community members How to be responsible digital citizens We hope that students and educators gain useful skills and a holistic understanding about responsible digital citizenship, not only on YouTube, but in all online activity."

Top ten computer science teaching resources A pioneering head of ICT shares some fantastic routes into teaching children code and computing

Top ten computer science teaching resources A pioneering head of ICT shares some fantastic routes into teaching children code and computing

Alice is an engaging, introductory programming environment for the creation of animations and games using 3D models. Alice features a drag-and-drop interface that eliminates the frustration of syntax errors for beginning programmers.  This list is for educators who are teaching with Alice or who are considering teaching with Alice (either 2.2 or 3). The purpose of this list is to provide and quick and easy way to ask questions, post ideas and nifty assignments, and generally support all members of the Alice teaching community. 

Are you teaching Advanced Placement Computer Science? Are you looking for supplemental exercises that may help you students with the concepts? If so this announcement may be of interest to you. Pex for Fun has been around for a while offering coding duels in C#, F# and Visual Basic. Recently though it was decided to invest some time, money and effort to adapt some exercises specifically to help learn APCS concepts. Most students find the differences between Java and C# pretty minor at this level so most APCS students will find this doable even if they have only been taught Java previously.

Welcome to the SIGCT (Computing Teachers) Wiki.

.NET Gadgeteer can be used in schools to help students make gadgets and learn C# programming along the way. These lesson plans give teachers all the material needed to run 8 1-hour sessions using .NET Gadgeteer. You will also need the hardware, details of which are given at http://netmf.com/gadgeteer.

Every day, more and more teachers are using the world-building game Minecraft to engage and educate. The game is a true phenomenon and gamers young and old are using it in countless creative ways. Practitioners of Games Based Education have realized the potential and have embraced Minecraft in classrooms around the world. Now you can too!

 Oracle Academy prepares students for 21st century careers and provides teachers with world-class training and professional development opportunities.

I checked out their website and I find it a bit of a joke. First off, their Introduction to CS includes topics like PL/SQL which is proprietary. Oracle states that their Introduction to CS workshop is free and then when you go to enrol it is only available in China, India, and Brazil. I was expecting them to offer something like the FREE course that Stanford offered this spring by Nick Parlante.

This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city's first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York's elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money.