Computational Thinking for Educators 

Computational Thinking (CT) is a problem solving process that includes a number of characteristics and dispositions. CT is essential to the development of computer applications, but it can also be used to support problem solving across all disciplines, including the humanities, math, and science. Students who learn CT across the curriculum can begin to see a relationship between academic subjects, as well as between life inside and outside of the classroom.

Source: Computational Thinking for Educators – – Unit 1 – Introducing Computational Thinking

Hopscotch Curriculum

We’re really excited that you’re going to teach your students to program, both for them and for you. Kids have remarkable imaginations, and creating computer programs is an amazing way for them to express themselves. We’ve seen kids create astonishing things using our simple but powerful tool. We know you’ll see the same when using Hopscotch, and hope you share what your students create. Anyone, regardless of their experience in programming, can teach this curriculum. Just as Hopscotch was built on the principle that anyone can become a great programmer, this curriculum is designed on the premise that anyone can become a great programming teacher. Programming is a way of thinking, building, and expressing yourself. Just as English is not really about grammar, and history is not memorizing dates, computer programming is not actually about code or computers. Just as we ask students to make connections between events in history, we ask students to investigate the interactions between complex systems in computer science.

Hopscotch Curriuculum

Hopscotch Curriculum You Tube

Facebook’s New Spam-Killer Hints at the Future of Coding | WIRED

LOUIS BRANDY PAUSES before answering, needing some extra time to choose his words. “I’m going to get in so much trouble,” he says. The question, you see, touches on an eternally controversial topic: the future of computer programming languages. Brandy is a software engineer at Facebook, and alongside a team of other Facebookers, he spent the last two years rebuilding the system that removes spam—malicious, offensive, or otherwise unwanted messages—from the world’s largest social network. That’s no small task—Facebook juggles messages from more than 1.5 billion people worldwide—and to tackle the problem, Brandy and team made an unusual choice: they used a programming language called Haskell.

Source: Facebook’s New Spam-Killer Hints at the Future of Coding | WIRED

New Dimensions to Scratch

In this hands on workshop, you will use the extensions for littleBits, Leap Motion, SparkFun’s Digital Sandbox and Makey Makey and the Make!Sense sensors with Scratch 2.0 to remix projects that change what you see on the screen by interacting with the physical world. Using challenge activities participants will learn the concepts by remixing projects on the spot with live help. Reflection, documentation and community support will be discussed and shared. Kreg Hanning (Lesley University, Cambridge, US) khanning@lesley.edu twitter: @khanning88 Susan Ettenheim (Eleanor Roosevelt High School, New York City, US) settenheim@erhsnyc.net twitter: @susanettenheim

Source: New Dimensions to Scratch

CodeBuddies.org

We’re a community of independent code learners who sometimes schedule Google Hangouts to co-work silently on personal projects, pair program, or help each other master tutorials. Sharing knowledge with others is fun and helps us learn faster. The project is free and open-sourced on Github. A couple of awesome people have made pull requests to this platform so far! 🙂 We now also have a public Slack chatroom, a third-party chatroom app with multiple channels where you can jump in to say hello, ask for advice, share what you’re working on, follow up after a Google Hangout, or find new study partners. You can invite yourself to the chatroom here.

Source: CodeBuddies.org

RBXDev – Home

Creating multiplayer, physics-based games has never been easier. Use our powerful development environment, ROBLOX Studio, to construct your worlds out of simple physical primitives. Snap blocks together or blow them apart. Use motors, hinges, and other joints to build vehicles and other mechatronic assemblies. Script interactions in Lua, a game industry-standard scripting language. Forget about writing boilerplate code to glue all your entities together a networked environment – not necessary. Prototype a multiplayer game in minutes. If you can imagine it, you can create it in ROBLOX.

Source: RBXDev – Home

Learn C++ – Start Coding in C++ – Udemy

C++ is a general purpose programming language. Anyone already programming at the very least knows of the existence of this programming language. C++ is powerful and offers its developers a wide range of programming paradigms. The language is often favored by those who are building software that interacts with low level resources or the hardware of a computing device; even a large number of desktop applications prefer C++ due to its light weight runtime and flexibility. The language provides facilities that many other languages simply refuse to – possibly in order to keep things sane and simple. For example, with C++ it is possible to do low-level memory manipulation, which makes it an ideal choice for building hardware drivers, operating system kernels, software that runs on embedded systems, etc.

The wide array of features that C++ provides and the numerous ways of doing anything in C++ makes it a difficult task to put everything about this language in one post. In this article, we make an attempt to briefly touch on some aspects of the language that should let a programmer with some experience in other object oriented languages get started with C++.

Source: Learn C++ – Start Coding in C++ – Udemy

ComputerCraftEdu

ComputerCraftEdu brings programmable turtle robots to Minecraft!It is a new way to learn computational thinking inside Minecraft. Players will start with a tile-based interface to learn the fundamentals of programming in a fun, accessible environment. They will be engaged and motivated to find ways to use turtles to automate and extend their usual Minecraft activities. Whether you are completely new to programming or you already have some experience, ComputerCraftEdu is an easy and fun way to learn important real world skills and get creative on a whole new level.

Source: ComputerCraftEdu