It was both a slow week and a busy week last week. Slow online for the most part. There were a couple of big events that friends of mine were at but I was home. Microsoft had the world wide finals of the Imagine Cup in Redmond last week. A couple of years ago I might well have been there. It is a great event especially for university students – few high school teams make it as far as the world wide event.
Apparently Edutopia had a big event at the Skywalker Ranch in California as well. I expect to read blog posts about that this week. Mostly I have been doing lesson planning with school scheduled to restart in about two weeks. But there are some links to share.
Code.org announced that the Computer Science Education Act is now the most-supported education bill in Congress! Over 100 co-sponsors. I’ll be a bit more excited if Congress actually passes it though.
The 
Scratch Team at MIT @scratchteam announced that ScratchJr (for ages 5-7) is now available as a free iPad app. And claims that “coding is the new literacy!” See http://scratchjr.org for more information. Ages 5-7? I’m interested in how that plays out.
The Anita Borg Institute posted a link to 20 TED Talks by Women in Computer Science which I really need to spend some time watching. Maybe I’ll find one for use with my students.
Mike Zamansky continues his series on building a High School CS Summer program with SHIP - the Toolset Once he is done I plan to post an index if he doesn’t. A lot of good stuff going on. I think his model is reproducible if the right people, teachers and students, with a good culture can be found. Culture is under appreciated by many programs but not at Stuyvesant where Mike teaches.
Alfred - thanks for the shout out and happy birthday!!!!
ReplyDeleteNow that SHIP is over, I still plan a couple more posts -- the crew, funding as well as an assessment of the whole thing (which will probably come before the crew and funding posts). Going to try to get those posted between bits of actual vacation.