Category: news

Cornell NYC Tech, Planned for Roosevelt Island, Starts Up in Chelsea – NYTimes.com

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA Published: April 12, 2013

IF all the hopes and hype are warranted, a nondescript third-floor loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan offers a glimpse of the future, for New York City and for Cornell University. In truth, it doesn’t look like much — just cubicles and meeting rooms in space donated by Google. But looks deceive; here, with little fanfare, Cornell’s new graduate school of applied sciences is being rolled out.

The sparkling, sprawling new campus on Roosevelt Island filled with gee-whiz technology — still just ink on paper. The thousands of students and staff, the transformative effect on the city’s economy, the integration withthe Technion-Israel Institute of Technology — those all remain in the future, too.

continue reading Cornell NYC Tech, Planned for Roosevelt Island, Starts Up in Chelsea – NYTimes.com.

Opening a Gateway for Girls to Enter the Computer Field – NYTimes.com

BY CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

WHEN Julia Geist was asked to draw a picture of a computer scientist last year, the 16-year-old sketched a businessman wearing glasses and a tie. Looking around at her classmates’ drawings, she saw similar depictions of men.

Now, Ms. Geist said, “I see a computer scientist could be anyone” — including herself.

Her new perspective is a victory for Girls Who Code. As part of an eight-week program with the Manhattan-based nonprofit group, Ms. Geist and 19 other high school girls learned software programming, public speaking, product development and other skills to prepare them for jobs in the technology industry.

Girls Who Code is among the recent crop of programs intended to close the gender gap in tech by intervening early, when young women are deciding what they want to study. With names like Hackbright Academy, Girl Develop It, Black Girls Code and Girls Teaching Girls to Code, these groups try to present a more exciting image of computer science

via Opening a Gateway for Girls to Enter the Computer Field – NYTimes.com.

Software Engineering School Was Teacher’s Idea, but It’s Been Done City’s Way – NYTimes.com

By JENNIFER MILLER Published: March 29, 2013

At last year’s State of the City speech, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the creation of a public high school called the Academy for Software Engineering. The school would be part of an ambitious expansion of computer science education in the city, and Mr. Bloomberg called it the “brainchild” of a local teacher named Michael Zamansky.

Mr. Zamansky was seated on the stage, a few steps from the mayor. But by that point, he said recently, the project was his in name only: he said he had been effectively cut out of the school’s planning process, and his vision of an elite program had given way to one that was more focused on practical job skills.

continue reading –Software Engineering School Was Teacher’s Idea, but It’s Been Done City’s Way – NYTimes.com.

The dark side of the beloved Python | ITworld

The dark side of the beloved Python

The schism between Python 2.x and 3.x and other deficiencies frustrate its enthusiastic developer community

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld |  Software, python

March 25, 2013, 3:11 PM — Python, the popular dynamic language, offers conciseness and a strong community. But it is dogged by the transition from the 2.x family to the 3.x line.

The language shows up as one of the most popular languages on the GitHub code-sharing site, accounting for 8% of code on the site and trailing only JavaScript, Ruby, and Java. But not all is rosy in the Python realm. After four years, programmers still are navigating a difficult transition from the 2.x to the 3.x version of the language because the 2.x version has been maintained in parallel, giving developers a reason to put off a migration to 3.x.

continue reading – The dark side of the beloved Python | ITworld.

Lockheed Martin Harnesses Quantum Technology – NYTimes.com

Quantum computing is so much faster than traditional computing because of the unusual properties of particles at the smallest level. Instead of the precision of ones and zeros that have been used to represent data since the earliest days of computers, quantum computing relies on the fact that subatomic particles inhabit a range of states. Different relationships among the particles may coexist, as well. Those probable states can be narrowed to determine an optimal outcome among a near-infinitude of possibilities, which allows certain types of problems to be solved rapidly.

continue reading-  Lockheed Martin Harnesses Quantum Technology – NYTimes.com.

Introducing Kids to Java Programming Using Minecraft (Arun Gupta, Miles to go …)

Minecraft is a wildly popular game among elementary and middle schoolers. The game allows players to build constructions of textured cubes in a 3D world.

My son has been playing the game for about a year, lets say addicted to it. Last Fall he told me that the game is corrupted because the JAR file snapshot has messed up the configuration. And that right away rang a bell in me as a Java Evangelist at Oracle.

I learned from him that the game is written in Java, has a trial version that runs as an applet in the browser, and downloaded as a JAR file for desktop. The game is modular where the players travel through a world and chunks are loaded and unloaded to keep the memory footprint small. Something unique about the game is the ability to modify the game from what it was originally designed for. In Minecraft language, this is called as a “mod” – short for modifications. For example, a mod can add new characters to the game, change look-and-feel of the play field, or make it easy to build new structures.

continue reading-  Introducing Kids to Java Programming Using Minecraft (Arun Gupta, Miles to go …).

Where Does Tech-ed Belong in Edtech? | EdSurge News

Students need to learn how to create, not consume, technologies in the classroom.

Edtech is about the use of technology in education, but does it include technology education? Should it include computer science education?

“Edtech” is an all-inclusive term, and computer science is thrown in along with iPad apps, blended learning, BYOD strategies and everything else. However, computer science education sometimes appears to be that distant cousin in the edtech family; it must be included in the party but no one really knows how to deal with it.

Most of the edtech community is interested in “using technology” to improve student learning in what is already being taught in our schools–math, reading, science, etc. We are excited that our students now use a browser to do research, Google docs to write and online games for math drills. We are happy that our teachers use a cool app to create a spelling quiz, or a YouTube video to teach math.

But while these are all significant steps in using technology to enhance traditional learning, we are not yet changing the “what and how” in student learning. Students and teachers are still consuming technology, but not necessarily understanding how to use it to create their own tools.

continue reading- Where Does Tech ed Belong in Edtech? | EdSurge News.