Group items tagged

Languages are important. We teach them to children. But we ignore computer programming languages - perhaps some of the most important fluencies anyone can acquire. Instead, we black box them and hope they MIGHT look at doing this in college, when in fact, many of the best jobs and opportunities lie in languages: both "foreign" languages and computer languages. Thought provoking blog post about a conversation: "Many interesting and stimulating things were said, but one I remember was from Peter Pham over dinner. It was a simple line, "why do we teach languages in junior high and high school but not a computer language?" that had profound meaning to me."

Computer Science education week is this week. Download and share information here. Give the students a present of their future during the holiday season by taking a day of class to talk about computer science. This is important. Talk about it even if you're not great with technology. 

Information on popfly and windows live writer and how it may be used in the classroom. Cool post.

This is a fascinating blog post about how Alfred Thompson used PopFly to create a mashup activity for a classroom demo for teachers. He also took this document from word into Live writer to make a blog post. It is important to look at many ways to do things. I found this information very insightful and cool.

The new Computer Science survey is out from US high schools - the findings do not bode well for computer science: "the number of schools offering Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS) has declined significantly in the last six years. In 2005, 40 percent of respondents indicated AP CS was offered at their school. This number decreased to 32 percent in 2007 and to 27 percent in the 2009 survey. AP CS is in many cases the most rigorous course offered by schools. " I wonder how many programs are introducing programming concepts at other levels or using something like Scratch. Should Computer science just be defined as AP computer science?

Computer science teachers planning this summer should look at this overview from Microsoft uber-blogger Alfred Thompson.

Conversations about Computer Science education week are beginning to float around. I think we can do many easy things including webinars and sessions with leaders that students can interact with live and even just a hashtag for people to follow on twitter who care about the topic would be useful.

Computer Science Education week in the USA is going to be December 7th - Microsoft Blogger Alfred Thompson (and in my humble opinion one of the definitive leaders in advocating computer science education) has shared a blog post about this. If you teach computer science or touch on it, consider planning some things.

Computer Science Education week

Nice post from my computer science go-to guy in education- Alfred Thompson. He contemplates why a college like Stanford is seeing a growth in Computer Science while high schools aren't. Interesting conversation and one we need to be having -- computer science jobs are some of the few that they just can't seem to staff fast enough.

Some major computer science programs at top universities are seeing a slight uptick in the number of women going into the programs. Citing statistics from Harvard (up from 13% to 25%) and MIT (a 28% jump in 3 years), and Carnegie Mellon (from 1/5 in 2007 to 1/4 last year.) Most think it is the economy although some attribute programs to get more women interested in the programs.

Lesson plans for Algebra, Physics, and CS