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Hour Of Code

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Guess what this week is, boys and girls? That’s right. It’s Computer Science Education Week. And the Computer Science Teacher’s Association (did I mention I was the Nebraska chapter president) along with Code.org is sponsoring an Hour of Code.

So far over 6,000,000 people have tried their hand at writing computer programs for an hour. We’re having all of the students at Lincoln Lutheran give it a try (during math class). We’re doing it over a two-day period and it’s been working out okay.

There are about 20 different tutorials that you can choose from. We’re having students start off with the Angry Birds/Plants vs. Zombies tutorial. It uses a programming language called Scratch that you program by dragging different colored blocks around the screen.

The tutorials are mostly game-like. And, while you can’t do anything really Earth-shaking in an hour, you can get an idea of whether you might like to learn more about programming. They say that there will be 1,400,000 new Computer Science jobs in the next 6 year, but we are on pace to produce only 400,000 Computer Science majors.

This concerns big computer companies like Google and Microsoft, so they are sponsoring this sort of thing to encourage more people to study programming (and to encourage more schools to teach it).

You can try the Angry Bird’s  Tutorial and see what you think. No, seriously, give it a try.

Look, a new website

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Lauren has been really busy lately, so I asked her if she wanted me to write a post. She said, “Always.” Which I thought was a little over the top, but in the spirit of the thing I said, “Okay.”

Then I realized that I didn’t really have anything to say. So I will, instead, attempt to get you to paint my fence. I’ve been working on a new website for a while and although it’s live and seems to be doing alright, I really haven’t gotten any feedback on it from anyone.

If you have time, go take a look and tell me if anything doesn’t look right. You don’t have to fill out forms or anything. I’m reasonably sure that everything actually works. I just don’t know how it looks. It’s like they say about selling your home. You want to have someone who doesn’t live in the home come and point out all of the little things that need to be done that you don’t see any more, because you’ve been looking at them for 10 year and besides, you were always going to get around to fixing it anyway.

CSTAnebraska

CSTA stands for Computer Science Teachers Association.

 

Our first event

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Warning: Boring post ahead…

So, Lauren didn’t want to post anything today. My first thought was to try to describe what the stomach flu was like, but I’m going to give that a pass for the time being.

Instead, let me tell you about the latest geeky thing in my life. Over the last few months, a group of computer science teachers around here have been putting together our very own Nebraska Chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association*. A little less than a month ago we were approved as a chapter and  on Tuesday we held our first Event.

I bet you didn’t know that this was Computer Science Education Week (yes, there’s a website). One of the things they tell us when they can get us to look up from our computers is that people think that all we do is stare at computers. So we rounded up the only 3 guys who work with computers who actually do anything and had them show [and tell] as many high school students [as we could convince to give up an hour of their evening] the cool stuff they were working on.

It was actually some pretty cool stuff. Attaching computers to cranes to track migration, behavior, habitat and so forth. The computers actually sent data back via text messages. One crane sent 25,000+ texts. I hope they got an unlimited plan. Burying computers in a corn field to track moisture content and tell the center pivot how much water to spray in each portion of the field (okay, that last bit is only exciting in Nebraska).

One guy was working on flying robots that could collect water samples or maintain devices that monitor the structural integrity of bridges. He brought one of the flying robots and you can just barely see it in this picture it you know where to look (this photo was taken after the event while he was just showing off).

I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with R.

The third guy was working with simulation of complex real world objects to try to solve problems that are traditionally hard for computers to solve. Things like how traffic light timing should change in response to traffic accidents in order to let traffic flow as smoothly as possible. Or figuring out the optimal number of firefighters for any given part of a forest fire.

We had a pretty good turnout, and the people who came asked some good questions afterwards. I am pronouncing our first event a success. And, as no description of puking was involved, I think we can call this post a success as well. In fact, that might be a good enough description of success in general.