What Most Schools Don’t Teach - Short Film (by CodeOrg)
The 10,000 boards sold out within hours of going on sale in February last year, with an incredible 100,000 boards ordered on that first day.
Today more than 700,000 Raspberry Pi computers have been shipped to modders who are fitting them to robotic drones in the sky and underwater, to hobbyists designing home automation systems, and to wannabe coders looking to build their first programs
“Most of the female students were unwilling to go on in computer science because of the stereotypes they had grown up with,” said Zachary Dodds, a computer scientist at Mudd. “We realized we were helping perpetuate that by teaching such a standard course.”
To reduce the intimidation factor, the course was divided into two sections — “gold,” for those with no prior experience, and “black” for everyone else. Java, a notoriously opaque programming language, was replaced by a more accessible language called Python. And the focus of the course changed to computational approaches to solving problems across science.
“We realized that we needed to show students computer science is not all about programming,” said Ran Libeskind-Hadas, chairman of the department. “It has intellectual depth and connections to other disciplines.”
When he is not volunteering as a computer science instructor four days a week, Mr. Edouard works at Microsoft. He is one of 110 engineers from high-tech companies who are part of a Microsoft program aimed at getting high school students hooked on computer science
The Tiger Leap Foundation in Estonia has launched a program … which allows Estonian students from grades 1 to 12 to learn computer programming at school…. The first programming classes will be for primary schools, and are set to start after their teachers go through training this month. Next year, secondary level courses will be added for middle schools and some high schools.Study materials for all levels of training are already under construction. The program is only for pilot schools right now, but in the years to come all public schools will be able to join ProgeTiiger.
of the more than 100,000 students who first signed up for CS101, just 30,000 completed the first lesson, and even fewer, 10,000, hacked their way through the final exam. A 90 per cent drop-out rate doesn’t look great on paper, but then, Udacity’s only admission requirement is an email address…. two-thirds of our students are from outside the United States,” Stavens, now the CEO of Udacity, said. “It’s about a third US, a third from ten other countries you might expect—western Europe, Brazil, east Asia, Canada—and then about a third from 185 other countries. We have 500 students in Latvia. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it actually means more students take our classes in Latvia than take them on Stanford’s campus.
Twitter, Google, and others join Girls Who Code mentorship program | The Verge
According to Girls Who Code, while women earn 57 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States, just 14 percent of computer science degrees go to women — and less than 10 percent of venture capital-backed companies have been founded by women.
there’s a strong case to be made for the study and debate of digital media to be a compulsory part of the world’s education systems, alongside literacy, numeracy and science. This doesn’t mean the kind of all-too-basic ‘how to’ guides that leave media-savvy students cold, but rather a combination of digital history with opportunities to debate the realities and limitations of everything from social-media services and search engines to avatars and World of Warcraft.
Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig’s) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000.
In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. “I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said ‘If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?’ And I said: I. Don’t. Care.”
In the end, there were 160,000 people signed up, from every country in the world, he says, except North Korea. Rather than tape boring lectures, the professors asked students to solve problems and then the next course video would discuss solutions. Mr. Thrun broke the rules again. Twenty-three thousand people finished the course. Of his 200 Stanford students, 30 attended lectures and the other 170 took it online. The top 410 performers on exams were online students. The first Stanford student was No. 411.
Slightly staggered about this. How can there be 6% of UK 16-24 year olds who have never moved a file on a computer? (did they not use a computer at school???) Also, I don’t quite believe that 25% of 16-24 year olds have written a computer program. But mostly… staggered that the EU would be researching this sort of thing in quite such a level of detail(!)
In the EU27, the share of computing graduates was 3.4% of all university graduates in 2009, compared with 4.0% in 2005
The Science Museum surveyed nearly 400 contemporary creative technologists to capture their experiences of 1980s computing, the Computer Literacy Project and the impact it had on their subsequent careers. 86.6% had used a BBC Micro, with almost all of them using it to write programs. 41.9% of all respondents had been involved in setting up their own companies.
