Book/Resource Review: The Cryptic Case of the Coded Fair

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Cryptic Case of the Coded Fair

The key to engagement in tech is to get children involved at a young age. Maybe there is a child in your life that is interested in puzzles, and just needs the support to know that being nerdy is okay? The most important thing that kept me in the technology field was being given access to classes, games, puzzles and having parents in STEM. An important resource that I wish I’d had, are age appropriate books about computer science. When growing up, there were books about everything from nature to athletics to medicine, but never computing. I am thrilled to see books like this available for kids!

The Cryptic Case of the Coded Fair by Barbara & Robert Tinker and Penny Noyce, is the most recent book in a series for 9-13 year olds about the Galactic Academy of Science (G.A.S.). In this book G.A.S. is attempting to save a science fair from Dr. G, the evil genius who is trying to discredit real science by sending encrypted messages to corrupt judges. In order to crack Dr. G’s messages, two middle schoolers, Ella and Shomari, are recruited to travel through time to learn about different ciphers and codes from different historical figures in encryption. They meet figures like Julius Caesar and Alan Turing, and are taught how they developed different coding techniques. Throughout the book there is also an interactive portion, where students can try out different ciphers with challenges online. Things like interactivity with a book can help expand ideas, while also keeping a child engaged.

While I am a bit beyond the age range for this book, I really enjoyed it! I learned something new while being immersed in a captivating story. Books like this can help children who may be hesitant about computing to see an interesting application, learn more about the field and maybe explore further possibilities.

By Julie Hubschman

Julie Hubschman is a junior Interdisciplinary Major in Human-Computer Interaction at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD. She is currently spending a semester in Scotland. She loves tech and robots named Jimmy.

Inspire kids to create our future: Apply for a 2015 RISE Award

Posted on September 11, 2014 by admin

Technology has the power to change the world for the better, but today far too few have access to the education or encouragement they need to become creators, not just consumers. Google knows that pre-university exposure to Computer Science education is critically important for inspiring kids to pursue a career in computing.

That’s why we offer the RISE Awards — grants of $15,000 to $50,000 USD — to organizations across the globe working to promote access to Computer Science education for girls and underrepresented minorities. Our RISE partners are changemakers: they engage, educate, and excite students about computing through extracurricular outreach.

In 2014, 42 organizations received RISE Awards—with projects ranging from coding clubs in Europe to web development camps in Sub-Saharan Africa. In April, we brought all of our partners together for a Global Summit that sparked resource sharing and collaboration amongst organizations.

We’re looking for more partners in 2015.
Submit your application by September 30, 2014 in English, French, Japanese, Russian or Spanish. All eligibility information is listed on our
website.

by Roxana Shirkhoda, Google K12/Pre-University Education Outreach

First Week Activity

Posted on August 15, 2014 by admin

Ever wish you had a set of activities for the first week of school to excite your students early on? There is a wonderful set of exercises that can be found at http://introcomputing.org/. These exercises were created by Nick Parlante based on his Stanford CS101 course.

These exercises work very well in introductory programming courses. Very little lecture time is needed as the exercises are written in a self-guided, interactive format.

My students most enjoy the “Digital Images” section. Here, students are guided through exercises where the ultimate product is a photo of the student superimposed onto another photo, using “bluescreen” techniques.

For example, given a photo of a stop sign and a photo of leaves, if all the red pixels in the photo of the stop sign are replaced with the corresponding pixels in the photo of leaves, the result is a stop sign made up of leaves.

This technique can be used to “superimpose” pictures of your students onto a variety of other pictures. I get a large sheet of blue paper from my school’s supply room and take each of my student’s pictures standing in front of the blue paper. The students then search the web for pictures they would like to insert themselves into. That’s where the fun begins. One of my students wrote a travelogue, showing all the countries he “visited” over the summer.

My students found it helpful to have all the commands on one summary page, so I’ve summarized the commands in the “Digital Images” section in this document.

Have fun!

Evelyn Torres-Rangel
CSTA Board of Directors

Thousands in Cash Prizes Available in Verizon Innovative App Challenge

Posted on August 6, 2014 by admin

Student teams across the nation are now invited to create novel ideas for the mobile app marketplace in the Verizon Innovative App Challenge. The competition offers middle and high school students the opportunity to apply their STEM knowledge and submit an idea for a mobile technology application that can be used to solve a societal or community problem. Registration for this contest is now open, and eight teams will win “Best in Nation” honors, each earning a $20,000 cash grant for their school.

No app building experience is necessary! Only an app idea is required for submission by a faculty advisor, who guides a team of five to seven students in the conceptualization process. This is the third year for this exciting competition by the Verizon Foundation, in partnership with the Technology Student Association. Registration and entry instructions can be found on the Verizon Innovative App Challenge website.

Contest Opens: August 4, 2014
Entry Deadline: November 24, 2014

Terry Lowe-Edwards
Marketing Manager
Technology Student Association

What’s Changed and What’s Stayed the Same

Posted on July 28, 2014 by admin

As I drove home from the 2014 CSTA Annual Conference last week, I reflected on how things have changed in my 33 years of teaching computer science. CSTA is beginning its 11th year and it has been an invaluable resource for those of us who remember the days when there was little to no support from anyone in our field. It is still too hard for us to make sure that others in our school communities know and appreciate how important computer science is, but at least we have each other.

Every time I attend any form of Professional Development, I am overwhelmed with how much I still don’t know about. In just the past 5 years, I’ve learned SNAP, HTML and JavaScript, C# with XNA Studio, Greenfoot, Calico including Scribbler robots, Scratch, Alice, Processing, GameMaker, Python 2.7 and 3.3, AppInventor, and much of the content for the new AP Computer Science Principles course. The AP Computer Science A course has been taught in Pascal, C++, and JAVA with object-oriented programming being a brand new paradigm. However, what I learned in high school in 1973 about using 3 control structures and lists/arrays to represent data is still the foundation for any program development. Designing algorithms is still the hardest part of programming and using pencil and paper still works better than simply starting to code. My involvement in the American Computer Science League reminds me of this as students use newer languages to solve hard problems, but still need to know about computer number systems, recursive functions, graph theory, bit strings, prefix and postfix notation, binary trees, stacks and queues, FSAs & regular expressions, Boolean algebra, and digital logic gates.

As Michael Kölling said in his closing keynote, “Every generation needs a new language. Languages grow or die.” He didn’t mention how exponential the growth is. The Hour of Code did wonders in promoting computer science and CSTA has been instrumental in equipping teachers of all ages and levels K-12 to keep pace and make a difference for the next generation.

Carlen Blackstone
Computer Science Teacher, Emmaus High School

What YOU Think of CSTA

Posted on June 22, 2014 by admin

Once a year we send out a survey link to members. We alternate between a survey that focuses on the landscape of Computer Science education (the National Computer Science High School Survey) and one that focuses on how CSTA is doing to meet the needs of our membership.

As the chair of the Membership Committee, I had the fun task of compiling the results of the membership survey into information for the organization. Along the way, I read every single comment that our respondents wrote. One of them asked if this information would ever be made public, if he would ever get to see how everyone else answered these questions. So here are the highlights:

Why did you join CSTA?
To belong to a community dedicated to excellence in K-12 Computer Science education and for access to resources and instructional materials (tied at 73%). Followed by access to cutting-edge research about current teaching practices and technologies at 70% and preferred access to vital professional development opportunities such as national symposia and workshops at 63%. Having a say in the development of critical policies concerning curriculum, standards, and certification came in last at 53%.

Of all the resources that CSTA provides, which are the most useful to you?
And the ranking is…

1. CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards and resources
2. Careers in computing resources (posters, brochures)
3. CSTA Regional/Chapter Workshops
4. CSTA Research (National Computer Science High School Survey)
5. Advocacy information
6. White papers (New Imperatives, Equity, Certification)
7. CSTA Annual Conference

The CSTA Board has a lot of good ideas of resources that would be useful to our members. We asked you to tell us which of our proposed membership benefits was most important. Here are the results:

1. More computer science curriculum resources
2. Regional conferences and workshops
3. Teacher mentorship program
4. More information for administrators
5. More brochures for students and parents
6. More classroom posters

What do you think of the Website, the Voice, the Advocate Blog?
Almost all members use the CSTA website “once in a while” and rated it “good” in all categories. Most of the respondents read the Voice, in fact only 38 respondents said they never read it. Of the respondents who do read it, most rated it “good” in all categories. This blog, however, did not fare as well. Almost half the respondents have never read the blog and 86% have never posted a comment. The half that have read it, rated it “good” in all categories.

How do you use the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards, the Crosswalk documents, and our research?
It turns out that there is still a significant population that is not aware of these resources or does not use them because they do not know where to find them. Thirty-five percent of respondents do not use the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards, and 63% of them indicated that they either are not aware of them or do not know where to find them. Only 21% of respondents have used the Crosswalk documents. The respondents who have not used them indicated that the reason was because they were not aware of them (56%) or do not know where to find them (26%). The results were similar for the research papers.

But, overall, what you do think of CSTA?
Only 1% of the respondents indicated that CSTA does not provide value to them as a professional. The same 1% would not recommend membership in CSTA to a colleague. Has membership in CSTA facilitated connections with other computer science educators? 63% say Yes!

Tammy Pirmann
School District Representative, CSTA Board of Directors
Chair of the Membership Committee

What are you doing this summer?

Posted on June 16, 2014 by admin

The school year is ending soon. For some it is over. AP CS teachers are happy the AP exam is over and many of them are looking forward to the AP CS reading. Others are shaking their heads at the very idea of people being happy to attend an event where they will spend hours on end grading student work. For the most part all teachers are thinking about their summer break. There will be some real rest and recreation for some. Second or third jobs for others. And many are looking forward to professional development.

For me this summer means two big professional development events – ISTE and the Annual CSTA Conference (www.cstaconference.org). I expect to learn a lot at each of those events. I love formal PD events. Over the years I have learned and grown from many of them. They’re wonderful. But they are not my end all and be all. Informal learning is also important and useful.

One of the wonderful things about teaching computer science is the plethora of new programming languages and development tools. OK it does make it hard to keep up at times and we cannot and should not just adopt new things for the sake of adopting new things. On the other hand we have many opportunities to learn new things and bring new interests to our students.

Have you got a coding project you’ve thought would be interesting to use as a demo or assign to students? Or perhaps some new way of doing things that might get students interested? Perhaps mobile phone development or touch computing or maybe using a Kinect for user interfaces? Or web development/programming? Think about using a new tool or programming language to take something on over the summer. Just like for students, working on projects is a great way to learn something new. Just be sure to choose a project that will be fun, interesting or solve a real problem you have so that you have lots of motivation to work at it.

Whatever you do to relax, rest, and recover from the school year try and learn something new as well. You and your students will both be better for it.

Alfred Thompson
At-large member
CSTA Board

CSTA Annual Conference Reminder

Posted on June 11, 2014 by admin

If you haven’t yet registered for the CSTA Annual Conference, time is running short. The conference takes place in St. Charles, Illinois (west of Chicago) on July 14-15. The deadline for reduced-rate housing is June 13 and online conference registration ends June 26. The full agenda for the conference, including keynotes and presentations, can be found at http://cstaconference.org. Be sure to check out the slate of outstanding workshops that are available in two sessions on Monday:

Morning Workshops:
* A Programming Approach to the CS: Principles “Data” Task
* Computational Thinking: from Game Design to STEM in One Week
* Developing CS Materials for the Guided Inquiry Classroom
* Introduction to Programming with Greenfoot
* Learning with TurtleArt
* Media Computation in Python (This workshop is FULL.)

Afternoon Workshops:
* Alice and Friends: Introducing Programming to Students, 5
* ArduBlock: Simple Yet Powerful Graphical Programming for Arduino
* Artbotics with Lego Mindstorms
* Introduction to Programming the HTML5 Canvas
* Mobile Computer Science Principles
* New Labs for the Advanced Placement Computer Science A Course (This workshop is FULL.)

Workshops are outstanding and affordable professional development opportunities, and if you register for two, you get a discount ($100 for two, versus $60 for one). We look forward to seeing you in July!

Dave Reed
Program Chair, CSTA Annual Conference
College Faculty Rep, CSTA Board of Directors

A Note from the Chair of CSTA’s Board of Directors

Posted on June 4, 2014 by admin

The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) is pleased to announce the appointment of Lissa Clayborn as Acting Executive Director of CSTA. Lissa is CSTA’s Director of Development and has worked closely with Chris Stephenson on CSTA projects and programs during the past three years and has over 18 years in non-profit management. Many CSTA members have collaborated with Lissa on various aspects of CSTA, including local chapter management and advocacy. Lissa assumed her duties as Acting Executive Director on May 24, 2014, after Chris Stephenson’s departure from CSTA to work at Google on May 23.

The CSTA Board of Directors, in collaboration with ACM leadership, has begun the process of searching for a new CSTA Executive Director. Next steps in the process include:

i. The CSTA Executive Committee will develop an updated job description for the CSTA Executive Director.
ii. The CSTA Executive Committee will organize a search committee for the position.
iii. The position and the updated job description will be publicized through the many networks with which CSTA is associated.
iv. The CSTA Board of Directors will have ongoing discussions throughout the process.

Deborah Seehorn
CSTA Board of Directors Chair

Are Parents Supporters or a Challenge for Computer Science in K-12?

Posted on April 26, 2013 by admin

As a K-12 Computer science teacher I am often presented with different challenges and they all vary depending on the grade level. Most of the time when we think about challenges, we focus on school budgets, school administrators, and curriculum challenges, but we usually don’t stop and think about the challenge that starts at home.

Often, the biggest challenges with the younger K-8 grades are the parents’ perception of what computer science is and what their kids should be learning in the computer science class. One of the phrases that I commonly hear when a student is struggling with a CS skill is: “But my child is so good with computers, he spends so much time on it and uses it so well, you should see him using the iPad, he uses it even better than me.” These parents simply do know that playing online games and using iPad apps is not really computer science. So, I find myself explaining over and over again what computer science is and why our school wants our students to become producers and not consumers. This is why our kindergarteners are learning about developing simple games and our first and second graders creating games using KODU.

Then we have the parents who insist that our curriculum is too difficult and the students should be coming to the computer lab to play games and have fun. I once had a parent conference in which the parent insisted that we should review the computer curriculum because we were actually trying to fail all kids by asking them to learn and do thing that were beyond their ages. Some parents still think that a computer science class should be a fancy typing, word processing, creating electronic worksheets and slideshows course or that it should be a course that students can take just to raise their GPA. Some parents have a hard time understanding that their kids are capable of so much more.

I have the privilege to work in a private school where most of my kids have access to different kinds of devices at home. This is a good and bad thing at the same time, because this makes parents think that their kids are expert computer scientists. They are experts at downloading apps, creating movies with iMovie or moviemaker, downloading songs from YouTube (copyright infringement is whole separate topic). I do not want to discredit these skills or applications, but my kids are also completely capable of coding or designing their own games. We just have to give them a chance!

This week I have the opportunity of addressing parents at a school assembly and explaining to them the importance on learning computer science in K-12, so let’s hope that opens the door to have more parent support and rise to that challenge.

Michelle Lagos
CSTA International Representative

The CSTA Advocate Blog

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