Month: September 2013

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.

Computer Science – Building an Operating System for CS Education – The Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education

Expanding computer science (CS) education is of vital importance to the United States. The scope of this challenge is demonstrated in the National Science Foundation’s “CS10K” vision. CS10K seeks to have rigorous academic CS courses in 10,000 high schools taught by 10,000 teachers by 2016. If the nation is going to achieve this goal and realize quality CS education across the country, our strategy needs to be grounded in understandings of our current capacity. Building on this foundation, CS education advocates will be able to identify the next steps to prepare, develop, and support all levels of CS teachers and advocate for the continued expansion and improvement of CS education.

The “Building an Operating System for Computer Science” (OS4CS) study was designed as a collaborative research and communication effort to establish a more comprehensive understanding of our nation’s current high school computer science (CS) teaching population, the support they have, and contexts in which they teach. The University of Chicago’s Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education (CEMSE) and Urban Education Institute (UEI) worked with a partnership established by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that includes the National Science Foundation (NSF), Google, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), Microsoft, and the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) to provide a wide range of information and guidance that would inform and shape CS education efforts.

via Computer Science – Building an Operating System for CS Education – The Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education.

Computer Programming for Beginners – Code Conquest

Welcome to Code Conquest – a FREE online guide to computer programming for beginners.

If you’re someone who wants to learn coding, but you haven’t got a clue where to start, you’ve come to the right place.

This site has all the step-by-step information you need to get started.

via Computer Programming for Beginners – Code Conquest.

Coder for Raspberry Pi

Coder is an experiment for Raspberry Pi, built by a small team of Googlers in New York. It’s a free piece of software that turns a Raspberry Pi into a simple, tiny, personal web server and web-based development environment–just what you need for crafting HTML, CSS, and Javascript while you’re learning to code. It just takes ten minutes to set up and you’re ready to start experimenting with building real web stuff.

via Coder for Raspberry Pi.

Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments – Phil Nichols – The Atlantic

Why educational technologies should be more like graphing calculators and less like iPads. An Object Lesson.

PHIL NICHOLS AUG 30 2013, 11:03 AM ET

Last year, while cleaning out the basement of my childhood home, I discovered a plastic storage bin marked “Calcusoft.” Inside were piles of notebooks filled with sketches, storyboards, and lines of code, and buried beneath it all, a TI-83 Plus graphing calculator.

I bought the calculator the summer before eighth grade, when it was included on a list of required supplies for students entering algebra. At the time, owning a graphing calculator was a small but significant rite of passage for a junior high student. It was a sign of academic sophistication. It announced to younger peers that the equations you were expected to solve outpaced the primitive features of meager, four-function devices. But most importantly, graphing calculators were programmable, which meant they were equipped to play games. While possession of a traditional handheld gaming system constituted a brazen breach of school rules, playing games on a calculator maintained the appearance of genuine scholarly work. A graphing calculator was like having a school-sanctioned Game Boy.

continue reading Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments – Phil Nichols – The Atlantic.

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.