GameMaker: Studio caters to entry-level novices and seasoned game development professionals equally, allowing them to create cross-platform games in record time and at a fraction of the cost!In addition to making games development 80 percent faster than coding for native languages, developers can create fully functional prototypes in just a few hours, and a full game in just a matter of weeks.
We believe that a solid computer science understanding is vital whether you want to fight climate change, make the next blockbuster movie or unlock the secrets of the universe.
We’ve taught thousands of students across Australia to program in classrooms, lecture halls and online, and are now bringing top-notch STEM education into classrooms and homes around the world.
By Grace Smith
If you’ve ever wanted to build an app for your business, blog, product or service, but the heavy investment of both time and money put you off, you’re not alone.
The good news is that entering the mobile market no longer necessarily requires thousands of dollars and months of work. There are many mobile platforms available to help you build an app on a budget — quickly, and with no coding knowledge required.
ScratchJr is a developmentally appropriate programming language for children 5 to 7 years old. Children can create their own animated stories, interactive collages and games. ScratchJr is the product of a collaboration between the DevTech Research Group at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, directed by Prof. Marina Bers, and the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab directed by Prof. Mitch Resnick. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF DRL-1118664), the ScratchJr iPad app is planned for release in early 2014.
The United States has fallen from producing a quarter of the world’s global output to less than one fifth, while nations like China and India have rapidly caught up. While there are many reasons for this trend, one major factor is the lack of innovation in computer science, due to lesser numbers of computer science students.
The Future Of Computing
In the next ten years, a million and a half jobs will need to be filled in the computer science industry. These may come from within the United States, but more likely will be filled by foreign workers. Between programmers, engineers, and administrators, the job growth in the computing industry is anywhere from twelve to thirty percent.
Financial Factors
Computer science is currently the highest-paid college degree. At the same time, employers say that they cannot find employees who have the computer skills needed to succeed in their workplace. This trend is expected to only get worse, with three times as many job openings as there are qualified persons to fit them. The end result is half a billion dollars on the table per year in salary.
Only one in four students in high school can take a computing class. 6 At the university level, only one in ten schools have computer-programming courses. Less than one in forty students graduate with a degree in computer science at the same time that there is a crucial labor shortage.5
To learn more about the “Why the US STEM Initiative Shouldn’t Overlook Computer Science”, created by New Jersey Institute of Technology, take a look at the infographic below.
NJIT Online Master of Science in Computer Science
via New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Online Masters Degree in Computer Science | STEM Infographic | Computer Science Online NJIT.
My son missed a day of school last week, and when he returned, his teacher gave him directions for his makeup work that were written in cursive. He returned to that teacher later in the day, and this exchange took place:
Son: Mrs. Soandso, excuse me, I‘m sorry, but I can’t read your writing.
He gave the note back to her. She smirked at him with a disapproving look. (His words.) Another student who didn’t learn to read or write cursive. She then looked at the note and was a bit puzzled. Something was wrong. Finally . . . .
Coding is the new literacy. It gives individuals the power to innovate and create. We need to empower our youth, especially those from underrepresented communities, to be tinkerers and to look under the hood of technology.
Because of a deficiency in early exposure to computer science, underrepresented youth are increasingly being marginalized from high-quality careers in the tech sector. For example, of all tech industry workers in the United States in 2012, only 22% were women, and African-Americans and Latinos each made up less than 5%. CodeNow believes this disparity is growing not from lack of interest but from a lack of access to computer programming.
CodeNow is a nonprofit that teaches foundational skills in computer programming to underserved high school students. We partner with community organizations to hold free, extra curricular, off campus trainings for high school students. Our program is essential because it lowers the barriers normally associated with technology by giving students exposure to programming at an early age when they are beginning to explore their options and opportunities. We are currently operating in New York City, Washington D.C., and San Francisco.
via Mission – CodeNOW.
I have a cart of iPads in my classroom for student use, so I’m very interested in STEM-related iPad apps!
According to Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager in “Invent to Learn,” “Three categories of [school computer] usage were outlined in Robert Taylor’s seminal book on the subject, The Computer in School: Tutor, Tool, Tutee (Taylor, 1980).” The first two computer uses predominate in schools. To use a computer as a “tutee,” however, students must PROGRAM or CODE the computer. While Scratch software (free) is my favorite programming environment to use with students, Scratch still relies on Adobe Flash so it doesn’t function completely on iOS devices like iPads. The following apps are designed specifically for coding on iPads.
via iPad Coding – STEM Curriculum Resources by Dr. Wesley Fryer.
Espresso Coding is a new service from Espresso Education that teaches pupils to code and make their own apps to share with their friends and parents. Its also FREE for an extended period until October 31st 2014.
Espresso Coding has everything you need to deliver the coding part of the curriculum for years 1 to 6 including:
Why do I need to teach Coding? View our FAQs to see some of the reasons all schools will need to teach this new topic.
This is the only tool your school needs to teach and learn how to code.
I’ve taught Arduino in class for a few years now, mostly to CS students, and just the other day introduced two friends to it again. Being on sabbatical and all, I couldn’t keep myself from just writing through the rest of that night and adding some Fritzing diagrams the next morning, and the result was a short little booklet introducing Arduino basics. I’ve since debugged it and added a bit more polish.
Yet another one, you say? Yes – the Arduino boards and IDE change so frequently that first-step tutorials and books are bound to become outdated after just a few months. I wanted something that got people started with the latest stable “beginner’s” board and IDE. I plan to update it as new boards and IDE versions come out, but I’ll keep older versions online too, so you can use them if you start out with an older board.
I’m forcing myself to keep it to one book page per experiment wherever possible – as I add information, I tighten up my writing to stay within that limit. Helps keep me from rambling on.
I also wanted to capture the fun of our hands-on learning session, with very little overhead. It’s written for people who’ve done a bit of programming at some point in their lives, but are new to electronics, and all experiments together can be completed in a long-ish night.
Finally, I wanted something that doesn’t take up your laptop screen while you’re working in the Arduino IDE, so it’s a PDF you can print, cut and bind into a 8×6″ booklet. That also happens to be the screen size of an iPad. 🙂
Feel free to use this for yourself, with your friends, or in your classes, and let me know how it goes! A request: instead of hosting a local copy of the PDF on your servers, simply link to http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/arduino. That way we can make sure everybody always gets the latest version, instead of old copies floating around. I’ll archive older versions here too. Thanks!
— Jan Borchers
