Monday, May 02, 2016

Interesting Links 2 May 2016

Back to school today after a week of vacation. I’m rested and ready for the final stretch of the school year. About seven weeks left. I spent a lot less time on the Internet last week than usual but still managed to collect some great links to share.

Did you see and sign the petition calling for Computer Science in all public schools? Some 82,000 signatures have joined the initial ones by an impressive list of CEOs, Governors, and education leaders. Check it out! Oh and take a look at Pat Yongpradit’s post on the Huffington Post - Dear Congress, Give Leila the Opportunity to Learn Computer Science

CS certification In Montana: ain’t going to happen soon by Garth Flint is a look at the problems caused by standards for teachers that are written by people who don’t understand what CS education is all about. I hope the K12 CS Framework under development will lead to some changes. But it will take time.

CS Fundamentals Unplugged from @codeorg unplugged lessons for your classroom to teach the fundamentals of Computer Science even without computers.

Introduction To Data Science “Imagine teaching your students how to predict, and then reduce injuries that happen in football games. Or help them learn how their favorite online retailer creates recommendations based on purchase and browsing history. This is the magic of data science, and it's one of the hottest subjects in schools across the US1.” Some new curriculum resources from Microsoft.

A rich problem - a Canadian coding/computing problem. A great project for Canadian CS teachers. For the rest of you, did you know that Canada was phasing out the penny? It makes for some interesting rounding off questions. Doug Peterson explores those and suggests some interesting related exercises around the issue. This may happen in the US one day not too far away.

Beyond Blocks: Syntax and Semantics – a valuable article on the issues around block based programming languages and the move from there to text based programming languages.

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