Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You [RESPONSE]

There are lots of things one can take away from this article but what I got most is “in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees.” HELLO! WAKE UP!

Computer Science is challenging, robust, enhances critical thinking, is dynamic, and provides starting salaries equivalent to the more popular entry level Engineering jobs. I mention Engineering because that is the career I hear my students talk about most but they are slowly coming to the CompSci side.

I agree with Kirk when he urges everyone to get involved in computer programming somehow, especially during your boring summers. Why not this summer? Why not ASAP. Okay, before 3rd grade may be a little challenging but why not introduce a programming language when children start learning cursive? Or really start to under their second language?

My daughter will enter 4th grade next year and although she started learning Spanish when she was in 1st grade she still can’t put a full sentence together. Guess what? You don’t make sentences when you program. For arguments sake you make mere sentence fragments and use short word phrases that are common with the current high school texting generation. All the more reason to learn more useful syntax than “Ard” and “TY”. Oh, and “YW”!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323744604578470900844821388.html?mod=trending_now_2

Yuri’s Code Spiel

Code for Philly presentation started out with a definition of Code For America.

Interview Special Interest “Fellows” to use technology to improve our society. SEPTA example: budgets, schedule access, etc. Code For America makes using SEPTA easier and more useful for citizens.

They collect a lot of data for these projects. They built a 311 app…Fir example the pothole reporting (or graphiti reporter). You can take a pic of either and submit it to the city to fix.

Well how does this benefit me? What languages do you use to code? How long are your internships? Are there any apps that are fun yet helpful (instead of just bettering Philly)? How many app projects are you working on at the same time?

What is your feedback?

Why Does Wisconsin Lock Up More Black Men Than Any Other State? [RESPONSE]

What a great question. When I think about it, the act almost seems racist. The article states that it looked at the prison population and “found that the state has the highest percentage of incarcerated black men in the country. About 1 in 8 black men of working age (13 percent) are in state prisons or jails”. This is very scary but why is this happening?

Maybe because “…African-Americans make up 6.5 percent of the state’s population [according to census figures]“. The author (Gene Demby) also states that “Milwaukee’s poor felons are concentrated in the same neighborhoods: The study also found that almost two-thirds of Milwaukee County’s incarcerated black men come from the city’s six poorest ZIP codes.” Talk about keeping the man down. Once black men do wrong and go to jail the game  is truly over for them because they will have problems getting a job. I think this will affect Milwaukee’s economy and crime rates for the current generation as well as generation in the future.

Read the article below and tell me (in SAOQ style) what your thoughts are.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/04/24/178817911/wisconsin-locks-up-more-of-its-black-men-than-any-other-state-study-finds

 

Extra help

Ms. D (as I like to call her) was helping a student out but this wasn’t any ordinary kind of help. While I was at Saturday school today I experienced teaching at its finest.

What happened today is what should happen regularly in every classroom but when you’re plagued (or challenged) by 20 plus students, the necessity of one to one teaching is compromised.

One of the students asked Ms. D to help them with a mathematical graphing equation of some sort. After she complied about five minutes passed by and the student came back with another question for Ms. D about the same problem. This happened one more time when it prompted Ms. D to ask the question, are you learning this material?

Often times teachers and students interchange question and answers to result in a great. This isn’t beneficial most of the time because the extrinsic motivator is the grade and that’s where learning ends.

How can we assess students beyond the grade? How can we motivate students to want to learn the material they originally earned the poor grade on or just don’t understand beyond the grade?

The Sweet Spot

When teaching in the flow you have hit the Sweet Spot.

When students follow your trail of learning breadcrumbs you have hit the Sweet Spot.

When students are engaged, thinking critically and are excited about it all, you have hit the Sweet Spot.

So what is this Sweet Spot? I believe it is when instruction meets an engaged student(s). It doesn’t take much but (just like golf) when you hit the sweet spot you know it. In golf you know it by the sound it makes or the way the shot looks (and sometimes feels). In education you know it by the feeling you get in your gut as you plan that perfect lesson, ask the perfect question, hear students interact in a particular way that enhances their learning experience or a combination of the all three.

Opening a Gateway for Girls to Enter the Computer Field - NYTimes.com

Reblogged from Computing Education Blog:

All these efforts to draw in more girls to computing are great, but the last sentence is a big deal.  How do we keep them?  How do we help girls to survive the thousand paper cuts?

Girls Who Code is among the recent crop of programs aiming to close the gender gap in tech by intervening early, when young women are deciding what they want to study.

Read more… 103 more words

This is very true but why? I know there are programs out there (like the aforementioned) to introduce girls to this field but why aren't they seizing these opportunities? As a minority, I understand they there once were barriers to entry for us and even more for minority females, but why aren't females interested in computing? The question still isn't answered for me. I think we should look into the allure matched with the wants and desires of girls in a career.

A New Group Aims to Make Programming Cool [RESPONSE]

In the article below, Hadi Partovi and his brother Ali, formed a nonprofit foundation with the sole purpose of making computer programming enticing to students. The incentive was the lack of interested student in the US. I think this movement is great! I am a Computer Instructor and as I reinvent myself (every trimester I teach in high school) I am gravitating more and more towards Computer Science.

The article boasts about their being “150,000 computing-job openings every year for the next seven years”. This is a major call for any student interested in a guaranteed job in the future. Being that our country has been in a recession (for at least the past six years) it seems like a good direction for students to head into and I couldn’t agree more. I am so invested and interested in programming (i.e. “coding”) that I am teaching myself more so that I may teach my future students.

The author (Nick Wingfield) states that not all of the future coding positions will be as attractive as a Google, Facebook, Microsoft, et al, but ”Many of them are in government, banks…life sciences and other fields…because of the growing importance of big data to those professions” (Wingfield).

Wingfield states that Mr. Partovi (et al) believe a lack of qualified teachers is one of the most serious problems blocking greater access to computer science in classrooms. I agree somewhat with this opinion but also feel that most public high schools are doing the same things they have always done and that’s teach the same curriculum the same way. There probably aren’t even Introduction to Computer Science courses taught in most public high schools in the United States. Why not?

There aren’t any in my high school and I am in the process of changing that. We implemented our first Intro to Programming course last year and have since added an Intro to Computer Graphics course that runs ever trimester. Change is inevitable but like most educational institutions, this is one area that we can’t be behind the curve on.

Please leave your comments and/or click one of the lower two links to make a difference.

New York Times article:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/a-new-group-aims-to-make-programming-cool/

Code.org video:

http://youtu.be/nKIu9yen5nc

Code Academy:

http://www.codecademy.com/