Interesting Links 27 April 2015

Here in New Hampshire we are on school vacation this week. Seems like a lot of places were on vacation last week. Like a lot of teachers I will be spending break time catching up both around the house and on school work. Grades mostly. I’m also going to sleep late. :-) It was a busy week last week though and I have collected a good group of links to share.

One thing I did last week was to update my blog post on Robots For Teaching Programming  with more robots thanks to the #CSK8 chat community. If you are interested in computer science education for grades K through 8 the #CSK8 chat is a great thing to take part in.

I saw this interesting weekend activity idea from #makewonder - robot fashion show: It’s designed for their Dash robot (I wrote about Dash and Dot previously) but I think this is an idea that would work for many other robot projects. Students like to make their robots personal.

Check out Professor Colleen Lewis’ online Scratch curriculum for ready-to-use CS classroom activities.

"Your password is too damn short"  is a useful article by Jeff Atwood on the topic of passwords. Most people don’t realize how vulnerable their passwords really are.

Thanks to @PennEngineers there is a 3-day Bootstrap workshop this Aug. 5-7; Open to the public; $150 registration  Bootstrap is a great curriculum merging math and computer science for middle schools.

Interesting new Facebook page patterned after the famous Humans of New York called Women of Silicon Valley   Yes there are women doing cool things in tech! Read about them on Facebook.

Create TouchDevelop games and win $3000 with the Break Into Code contest! This is an easy contest to enter even for beginners. THink Hour of Code with cash prizes. If you have students who took an interest in Hour of Code and are interested in a follow up (or who missed Hour of Code) this many be of interest to them.

CodeVA is currently working with several school districts to develop a semester Middle School Computer Science Course  Check it out if you teach or want to teach middle school CS.

Soon the Senate will vote to change computer science to a "core academic subject." Here's why it's a big deal according to Code.Org 

15 Netiquette Rules for Students  by Mark Burns – All in one infographic.

I saw this last week. I have a principal once tell me that his teachers were “not good with computers.” I asked him if it were acceptable to say “I’m not good with math” as an excuse for not getting grades done.