Category: news

Coding blended in school lessons – Business – The Boston Globe

Rob MacDonald scrawled an equation on a whiteboard, graphed it, then asked the students in his advanced calculus class to write a formula to calculate slope at any point on the curve.

It was just the third day of school, and the seniors at Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill furiously went to work, with most punching numbers into calculators and scribbling in notebooks. But one student, Lucas Cassels, turned to his laptop and a programming language called Python, which he has used to write a basic software application that can complete the assignment for him. All he had to do was input MacDonald’s equation, pick a point, and the app spit out the slope.

“Everyone should learn coding so they can take shortcuts in math class,” Cassels said with a grin.

The school agrees. Beaver Country Day has launched a program this year to teach computer coding to every student, beginning with upperclassmen and eventually expanding down to sixth-graders. With leading technology companies pressing Massachusetts to make computer science classes available in every school system, Beaver Country Day is taking an unorthodox approach: Rather than teach it as a distinct course, Beaver is integrating coding into all of its subjects, experimenting with uses not only in math and science classes, but even in English and art.

via Coding blended in school lessons – Business – The Boston Globe.

Coding the Curriculum: How High Schools Are Reprogramming Their Classes

There are no lockers in the hallways at Beaver Country Day School. Instead, backpacks and tote bags line either side of the floor while students step over them during the mid-morning rush to class. Nearly everyone is carrying a laptop.

“There used to be lockers, but nobody was really using them,” a passing staff member tells me with a shrug.

The private school, for grades six through twelve, sits in a quiet nook of Chestnut Hill, Mass. — a suburb sandwiched a few miles between, and directly below, Cambridge and downtown Boston. It’s not far from where Mark Zuckerberg built a world-changing social network from his Harvard University dorm room just nine years ago.

Two weeks ago, Beaver became the first school in the United States to implement computer coding into each of its classes.

via Coding the Curriculum: How High Schools Are Reprogramming Their Classes.

Very Young Programmers – NYTimes.com

By LISA GUERNSEY

Published: September 2, 2013

Ten years ago, a computer programming language called Scratch emerged from the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using colorful stackable icons to represent the sequencing and logic of computer code, Scratch was designed to make programming easy for children 8 and older. Today the free program is used in more than 150 countries and thousands of schools, with more than 1,500 animations and games uploaded to the online Scratch community each day. Even third and fourth graders call themselves coders.

But who says that 8 is the youngest you can teach children how to program? Now there is Scratch Jr. for children still learning to read and tie their shoes.

Designed for children in kindergarten through second grade, Scratch Jr. is not yet available to the public, though its founders are preparing for an iPad version in 2014. This school year, they are evaluating how it works in a handful of classrooms in Massachusetts. The project is led by Marina Umaschi Bers, a professor in the department of child development at Tufts University, and Mitchel Resnick, Scratch’s founder at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

via Very Young Programmers – NYTimes.com.

Code to Joy: The School for Poetic Computation Opens – NYTimes.com

AUGUST 12, 2013, 11:05 AM By AMY O’LEARY

New computer science graduates jumped by nearly 30 percent last year, and a bevy of professionally oriented programming courses have erupted to teach start-up ready skills like, “How to Build a Mobile App.” So it makes sense that programming is widely considered to be this generation’s “Plastics” — a surefire professional skill that can bring success, security and maybe even stock options.

But fewer people talk about how programming and engineering can be used for pleasure, beauty or surprise.

Now, four people with a variety of backgrounds — in computer science, art, math and design — have banded together in Brooklyn to rethink how programming is taught.

Their school, the School for Poetic Computation, is intended to be more passionate, free-spirited and curiosity-driven than other kinds of private coding schools that have cropped up in the last few years, like New York’s Hacker School which is project-based and paid by start-ups to recruit from their student body, or Seattle’s Code Fellows, which offers practical classes with an aim to get their students a job after graduation.

via Code to Joy: The School for Poetic Computation Opens – NYTimes.com.

MIT technology trailblazer is a critic of computerized learning | Hechinger Report

Mitchel Resnick is the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. His research group is best known for inventing two blockbuster educational technologies: the programmable bricks used in the LEGO Mindstorms robotics kits and Scratch, a computer programming language that allows children to create and share interactive stories, games and animations. The Hechinger Report talked to him about whether technology is changing education for better or worse.

Continue Reading: MIT technology trailblazer is a critic of computerized learning | Hechinger Report.

How smart developers generate lousy code | ITworld

By Esther Schindler

May 31, 2013, 10:03 AM

Most experienced developers can think of a time when they worked on a team with other accomplished programmers. Yet the code quality was anywhere from “eh” to “oh god you didn’t actually ship that did you?!” Here’s how this can happen, and what to do to minimize the chances it’ll happen to you.

Sarah Mei spoke about a time she worked on a team with really expert developers. Every one of them was someone whom you’d admire, who had previous written code that you and I would boast to have created. Yet, these smart people created modules that didn’t talk to each other. And its quality was, to be kind, on the rotten side.

You’ve probably encountered something like this at some point in your own programming career. Instead of the team creating more than the sum of its parts, the end result looked like something created by a novice developer. If not like crayon sketches from an untalented 6-year-old.

continue reading-  How smart developers generate lousy code | ITworld.

The coding movement: Resources for computer science education | eSchool News

In the middle of a resounding push for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education is a growing movement to expose children to computer science education and skills, also known as computer programming or coding.

According to Code.org statistics, computer science is the highest-paid college degree, and jobs in computer programming are growing at two times the national average–but despite that, fewer than 2.4 percent of college students graduate with a degree in computer science.

Conitnue reading: The coding movement: Resources for computer science education | eSchool News.

How to Be a ‘Woman Programmer’ – NYTimes.com

I WAS an ordinary computer programmer. I wrote code that ran at the levels between flashy human interfaces and the deep cores of operating systems, like the role of altos in a chorus, who provide the structure without your taking much notice of their melodic lines. I made realistic schedules and met my deadlines. Those were decent accomplishments.

continue reading- How to Be a ‘Woman Programmer’ – NYTimes.com.

Learn To Code, Code To Learn | EdSurge News

Mitchel Resnick

How programming prepares kids for more than math.

Is it important for all children to learn how to write? After all, very few children grow up to become journalists, novelists, or professional writers. So why should everyone learn to write?

Of course, such questions seem silly. People use writing in all parts of their lives: to send birthday messages to friends, to jot down shopping lists, to record personal feelings in diaries. The act of writing also engages people in new ways of thinking. As people write, they learn to organize, refine, and reflect on their ideas. Clearly, there are powerful reasons for everyone to learn to write.

I see coding (computer programming) as an extension of writing. The ability to code allows you to “write” new types of things – interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations. And, as with traditional writing, there are powerful reasons for everyone to learn to code.

via Learn To Code, Code To Learn | EdSurge News.