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.
Roominate: Make It Yours! by Maykah Inc. — Kickstarter
(via Clay Shirky) Kickstart Roominate: Dollhouse kit for girls that includes circuit components: lights, fans, buzzers, etc. kck.st/KtNGho … I think this is a superb idea
Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.
over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures
Peer-instructed students who’ve actively argued for and explained their understanding of scientific concepts hold onto their knowledge longer. Another benefit is cultivating more scientists. A comparison of intended and actual concentrators in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields indicates that those taught interactively are only half as likely to change to a non-STEM discipline as students in traditional courses.
iO Changing The Game Cartoon (by iOVideoLogs) … it’s a fun way to tell the story, makes a change from the usual slideshow
A quarter of all (Stanford) undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent. Some ask whether Stanford has struck the right balance between commerce and learning, between the acquisition of skills to make it and intellectual discovery for its own sake
Consider computer technology. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! The story is the same in other technology fields such as chemical engineering, math and statistics. Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance? If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying? In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.
This is the made up story about two very real girls – Ada, the world’s first computer programmer, and Mary, the world’s first science fiction author – caught up in a steampunk world of hot-air balloons and steam engines, jewel thieves and mechanical contraptions. For readers 8-12. (via Wollstonecraft by Airship Ambassador — Kickstarter)
the fashionable mantra that emerged recently – that “code is the new Latin” – is so perniciously clueless. It implies that programming is an engaging but fundamentally useless and optional skill. Latin is an intriguing, but dead, language; computer code is the lingo of networked life… The biggest justification for change is not economic but moral. It is that if we don’t act now we will be short-changing our children. They live in a world that is shaped by physics, chemistry, biology and history, and so we – rightly – want them to understand these things. But their world will be also shaped and configured by networked computing and if they don’t have a deeper understanding of this stuff then they will effectively be intellectually crippled.
