Q&A | CS10K Community

Promoting Computer Science

Hi

I am looking for more ways to promote Computer Science. Can more people share what they have done?

1. Yes, after the 100 teachers meeting I used puppies. We called it Puppies, Pizza and Programming.

2. In February, I gave testimony on a bill to make computer programming a mandatory part of the curriculum in middle schools in CT. My partner and I are writing an article that we hope to have appear in CSTA’s Voice later this year about our experience.

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Hour of Code Success Story

Hello all. I was encouraged to share my story about the Hour of Code from this year. I completed the hour of code in all of my classes (though, these are students who are already introduced to computer science) but as a way to get more people/students exposed I gave all of my students an assignment. They were to find another student at our school who is not currently in a computer science class and they were to take them through their hour of code. They had to document this event with screen shots and a picture of the two of them.

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Linux To The Rescue - It Really Did Today!

Our guidance department took over the computer lab today to administer a special College Board (College Level Examination Program) exam for a select group of students. Since the computers were running Windows XP, the software refused to validate the platform and the test would not run. A few students tried to take the test and got kicked out from the program.

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CIO view on the Hour of Code

http://feldman.org/blog/hour-of-code-cios/

"Coding isn’t about learning to code, it’s about becoming a systems thinker."

An article about Getting Students Excited and Engaged in Programming

An article I wrote to keep students engaged and excited while they learn to program. Please enjoy.

-http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/columns/open-classroom/how-to-get-students-excited-about-learning-to-code.html

Group Meeting 11/6/2014

Today we met at 4:00 in Pleasant Grove at the Horrocks Engineering building. All members were in attendance: Lynne Yocom, Audra Rodee, Brent Clark, Brock Halladay, Mike Wood.

Helpful at October meeting:

Talking to teachers after they had classroom experience about what was working and what wasn't.
Scratch. Everybody thought the time spent on scratch was worth it.

Didn't work as well:

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Free Computer Science Workshop for Teachers at Google Venice 11/8

Greetings ECS Educators

I know the ECS is a secondary school program, but I thought I would reach out to this community as well because the Computer Science Education community is well connected.

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Points of View: Telling a story with data (instructional day 10)

This lesson was really fun, it is one of my favorites. We had our papers to draw on and students had fun drawing and making lists and comparing the different ways to look at data. It took them a little while with the journal entry to know what to write, I had to give them examples. But once they started getting it they came up with some great ideas that we wrote on the board. (see image of board, can you find the japanese students' entries)

Computer Buying Project (instructional days 3-4)

The kids really liked this project and had lots of fun researching different computers. One thing I would have done differently that would have made it better was to make sure to explain the Interview assignment from the previous day and focused on the interview question examples. The more questions they asked in their interview the easier time they had putting their presentations together.

What is a computer (instructional days 1-2)

I gave the first lesson today. I was very nervous how the students would react, but they really got into it and enjoyed the lesson. I had fun too. We had a morning assembly at my school today so I only had 65 minutes to complete the whole lesson. I had them do the journal entry as bell work to save time. I condensed the group discussion time in half, which is good because I don't think I gave them enough direction about how to interact as a group and they were having trouble opening up at first.