CS Ed Week != Hour of Code

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With the fabulous success of Hour of Code last year, I think many of us have fallen into thinking that Computer Science Education Week (CS Ed Week) is “Hour of Code week.”

As in, “What are you doing for Hour of Code?”… I actually heard myself saying that to someone.

But of course CS Ed Week is much more than introducing your students to a coding lesson.

Teachers who I know are: showcasing their students’ project work, organizing a hackathon to benefit a charitable organization, sharing their year-long curricula with parents and colleagues, and screening films about famous computer scientists.

By the way, did you know that CS Ed Week is the week that it is because Grace Hopper was born on December 9 (1906)? I just learned this.

At my university, it’s finals week. So my students will be taking finals in my two computing courses. (This seems to happen every year.) But in the prior week, they’ll be showing off their final projects to the whole department!

For more resources and ideas, go to csedweek.org/csteacher to download a “Participation Kit for Computer Science Teachers” and list your activities on an international map.

So… “What are you doing for Computer Science Education Week?”

P.S. The languages I’m using most at the moment are Scheme and App Inventor. Below is this post’s title in those languages. Both evaluate to true.

Scheme / Racket / Lisp
(not (equal? 'cs-ed-week 'hour-of-code))

MIT App Inventor

Celebrate CS Ed Week, Celebrate You!

Posted on November 13, 2014 by admin

CS Ed Week is December 8-14th this year. Here are just a few ways as CSTA members you can get involved.

Faces of Computing Contest: You’ve still got time to submit a video entry for the Faces of Computing Contest. The deadline for submissions is November 20.

CS Ed Week CS Teachers Site: Check out this new resource for CS teachers. You’ll find examples of different events you can host, access to presentations, competitions, and more! Don’t forget to upload your events as well!

State Proclamations: For our members in the United States, don’t forget to ask your Governor to declare December 8-14th Computer Science Education Week.

Participate in Hour of Code: Short on time? There are lots of great activities to do with students and community members that only take one hour. Sign up and join in the Hour of Code.

Get Twitty With IT: Be sure to use the hashtag #CSEdWeek on Twitter to talk about your events, thoughts, and ideas. You can engage parents, community leaders, and even your students in why computer science education is a necessity in our world.

Engage Other CSTA Members: Start a conversation on the CSTA Membership listserv. Not yet a member of the listserv? Join here. You must be a CSTA member to join, but individual membership remains FREE, thanks to CSTA’s generous corporate sponsors: BirdBrain Technologies, the College Board, Google, Microsoft, Certiport, Oracle Academy, and Code.org.

Additional CS Ed Week Resources: Check out more CS Ed Week resources available to CSTA members on our CS Ed Week page. Download a poster, watch a video, or listen to an audio announcement that you can recreate in your own school.

CS Ed Week is really all about celebrating YOU, our CS educators, and all that you do to engage students in learning about computer science and the magic of the discipline. So go out and showcase your skills!

We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For

Posted on November 11, 2014 by admin

Excerpt | Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology

We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For
Mary Grove and Megan Smith

Mary Grove is Google’s director of global entrepreneurship outreach where she leads Google for Entrepreneurs, the company’s programs and partnerships to support start-ups and entrepreneurs in more than 100 countries around the world.

Megan Smith is the newly named U.S. chief technology officer. She is a former Google executive with a background in entrepreneurship and engineering.

All of us have inherited from history great gifts, innovations, wonderful culture, and sadly, extraordinary biases—both conscious and unconscious.

Today, the vast majority of gender bias is unconscious.The Equality Challenge Unit has shared extensive research about the nature and effect of bias; for example, our unconscious brain processes large amounts of information and looks for patterns 200,000 times faster than the conscious brain, and when it sees patterns occurring together (like seeing men alone in senior leadership), it wires those thoughts together neurally.

As we become much more aware of and educated about the complexities of these biases, how they operate, and the pain and extraordinary economic, cultural, political, creative, and social loss they cause for humanity, it’s our responsibility to act, to shift, to upgrade. None of us created these problems, but we can be the ones to make a huge push to fix them.

The gender gap is very real. If we quickly look at just the United States, we know that women make up 14 percent of Fortune 500 Executive Committees, 17 percent of Congress, and 11 percent of CEO/founder positions of U.S. firms backed by venture capital. These numbers vary by country around the world, but in most cases they are sadly similar or worse, and only on rare exception are they better. The treatment of women varies by country, including extreme regions where women are basically treated as property, places where nearly all of the sixteen points voiced in the historic Declaration of Sentiments, created at the world’s first Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, are still operating culturally and often legally. (If you haven’t already, the Declaration of Sentiments is worth reading to reflect on how far we have and have not come since the mid-1800s.)

For most of history, the vast majority of people were exposed to and became comfortable with a disparate reality for men and women. In every generation, there have been giants, both women and men, who have worked tirelessly for gender equality—but they faced, and still face, a constant uphill battle.

Today it feels like we’re at a tipping point in many parts of the world, where a growing majority of people are conscious of the need for women’s equal rights for so many reasons—that we are perhaps about to accelerate on our path to real, meaningful, and lasting gender equality. Activists, artists, and change makers everywhere continue to build upon centuries of incredible work, now that the Internet has dramatically expanded their reach and voice. Conversations abound about the empowerment of women and girls—moved from the sidelines to the center stage at the UN, across developed and developing countries. Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, has provoked greater dialogue across professional sectors, and research firms like McKinsey and Catalyst, alongside business schools like Kellogg, Harvard, and MIT, are doing the research we have long needed that shows why it’s economically valuable to have gender-inclusive and balanced teams, and how unconscious bias is operating everywhere to block progress. Long-standing groups who work for gender equality in technology fields, like National Center for Women & Information Technology and the Anita Borg Institute, are getting much more mainstream access to senior executives and others to help educate for change. Research now proves that gender-diverse teams and leadership make better products, companies, organizations, families, communities, and countries.

People across the world responded to the idea Vivek, Tavinder, Farai, Neesha, and their team had to collaboratively create this book—hundreds of women were able to efficiently contribute their personal stories. These are important accounts of their own difficult experiences with the real and perceptual historic biases we have inherited and how they are moving to write our next chapter. Thank you to everyone who has shared useful stories, broad experiences, deeply troubling challenges, success breakthroughs, and critical insights.

Sharing these personal stories and so many more is a big part of the solution.

Making these problems visible through real day-to-day experiences, both the hardship and examples of potential paths forward, show us the hopeless reality and the hopeful ways out.

The stories, the realities that each woman faces, are a powerful way to elicit empathy, allow us to understand much more specifically the challenges, and encourage all of us to look deeper at these issues and evolve.

We see two important opportunities for the future here: The first is championing and supporting organizations whose direct mission is to support women. Organizations like Astia, Women 2.0, Vital Voices, the Global Fund for Women, and UP Global are working directly to ensure more women have access to the opportunities they deserve. We both sit on the boards of some of these organizations and are fortunate to witness firsthand how tremendous leadership in action can lead to direct results.

In June 2013, UP Global hosted the Startup Weekend Women’s Edition SF and, with 85 percent women, clocked in with the highest number of women ever at a startup weekend. Many shared how they had long considered participating in a startup weekend event, but once they heard that one was specifically for female entrepreneurs, they jumped at the opportunity and never looked back. UP Global is working on a new initiative with support from Google for Entrepreneurs and Blackstone Foundation called Startup Women, an effort to increase participation of women across UP Global’s programs and help 1,500 women-led startups launch this year.

The second layer is thinking about increasing diversity as a thin underlay across all the work we do globally. We saw this with Manos Accelerator, a new tech accelerator for Latino startup founders; they made a conscious decision to ensure they filled their pipeline with both male and female founders, and subsequently their first class of startups featured five of the seven teams with a female founder. Google for Entrepreneurs launched the global #40Forward effort this year to increase representation of women in forty startup communities with forty partners. Organizations did everything from simply tweak the time of day of their events to launch women-focused accelerators. It’s not just about one organization or one community—the ideas is to shift the way we think about inclusion across the board.

There is enormous potential to tackle the world’s toughest challenges with women and men working together on solutions, tremendous opportunity to improve our communities and our countries and together to elevate our global human condition through entrepreneurship and “10X thinking.” It requires courage, rolling up our sleeves, and moving outside of our comfort zone and our traditional ways of thinking.

Gloria Steinem said, “Don’t think about making women fit the world—think about making the world fit women.” As an industry, we are just at the start of understanding this insight and how we might change and adapt our tech culture to better accommodate so many more innovators. If not now, when?

If not us, who? Take action.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Excerpted from Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology by Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya. Copyright 2014 by Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya. Excerpted by permission of Diversion Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Speak Up: Do Your Part to Support CS Education and Educators

Posted on November 10, 2014 by Stephanie Hoeppner

With people starting to make plans for CS Ed Week and the recent spotlight on making CS count for graduation I think it is important to remember the needs of the teachers. In order for CS to count and for there to be CS ED Week activities you need to have teachers who are teaching CS and/or who are raising awareness for it. You also need K-8 teachers who are given the freedom to incorporate CS into their elementary and middle grades curriculum. You need teachers.

While we need teachers, the teachers need the administration and the local, state, and national governance boards to recognize certifications, preparatory programs, and many other form of professional development for CS. Until CS teachers are recognized and supported as other content areas are, we will run the gamut of types of CS programs in our schools from full curriculum to nothing.

We have made much headway with CS but we still need stronger support through certifications and legislation. I think that sometimes we need to better educate ourselves of the landscape of CS and use successes to our advantage. For example, Ohio has had a computer science certification for many years. I have been teaching for 16 years and it was in place way before me. Others could use the example of our certification as a starting point for conversation with their state education boards. It is completely plausible to ask your state why Ohio recognizes CS certification, has for a long time, and yours does not. Okay so it may not be that easy but you never know. Last year CSTA put out a document that took a look at all of the states, what they recognize, and information about CS. It was called Bugs in the System:Computer Science Teacher Certification in the U.S. and is a fantastic resource if you are trying to raise CS awareness in your state.

So maybe you are thinking that you are not in a position to talk to your state education board and that is fine. However, with resources from other states you can also go to your local administration and board and propose that you start CS or improve your CS offerings. Use the states around you with CS certifications or programs as a selling point. If the states near you are doing something, you can propose that your school get ahead of the rest of your state and begin a CS program/ increase your program. The idea of being “first” at offering something or getting ahead of other places appeals to many schools.

I think as we approach CS ED Week we need to take a look around us at what is going on in classrooms and states around the nation. Even look at other countries and the CS curriculum they are creating. Use this information to show someone, whether local or on a bigger stage, that CS is happening, it is on the move, and it will be a part of our futures. How fast it becomes a part of our schools’ future depends largely on us. It depends on our passion, our resources, and how many people we can reach.

So spend some time on the CSTA website and find some resources that you can use as you are planning events and talking to your administration. There is a whole organization (CSTA) supporting you and standing with you as you advocate for CS.

Good LUCK!

To the Stars

Posted on November 3, 2014 by admin

Excerpt | Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology

To the Stars
Anousheh Ansari

Anousheh Ansari is a serial entrepreneur and cofounder and chairman of Prodea Systems, a company that will unleash the power of the Internet to all consumers and dramatically alter and simplify consumers’ digital living experience. Prior to founding Prodea Systems, Anousheh served as cofounder, CEO, and chairman of Telecom Technologies, Inc. On September 18, 2006, Anousheh became the first female private space explorer, the fourth private explorer to visit space, and the first astronaut of Iranian descent. She is a member of the X Prize Foundation’s Vision Circle as well as its Board of Trustees. She is a life member in the Association of Space Explorers and on the advisory board of the Teachers in Space project.

I immigrated to the United States from Iran, a teenager who didn’t speak a word of English. Growing up in Iran, my head was always in the clouds. At night I would spend hours watching the stars, wanting nothing more than to become an astronaut, to fly to space and touch them. My mind was filled with a future where starships would fly to every corner of the universe. I would be the science officer aboard the Starship Enterprise, traveling through wormholes and exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations—to boldly go where no one has gone before. I dreamed of a future with time machines, parallel universes, teleportation and a United Federation of Planets. I was fascinated by all these possibilities because when you’re a child, everything is possible—there are no boundaries, and everything is a puzzle to be solved, every dark corner an opportunity for discovery.

When I arrived in the United States, the realities of life put me on a completely different path. I went to school and studied electrical engineering while working full-time. My family moved to the United States with nothing but hopes for a new life and a better future, so finding a job to support myself and my family was important. I found a job at a major telecommunications company, MCI, and started my career as an engineer. Working at MCI was a great experience—I learned the ins and outs of the corporate world while learning a lot about the telecom industry.

President Roosevelt once said: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” I like to believe that’s how I live my life, and so, a few years later, after meeting my husband at MCI, we both left the company and started on our road to entrepreneurship.

Building a company from scratch and growing it is exciting, but also a big challenge. It is very much like raising a child: while it’s very rewarding, it also has its share of ups and downs. As a female CEO of a tech company, I learned that even though I lived in one of the most advanced western societies, certain prejudices against women in leadership positions, especially in high tech, still persevered. However, my philosophy has always been to do my best in everything I set my mind to and let my work speak for itself. This has proven to be a most successful strategy and has turned many skeptics into believers and friends.

Although I became a very successful entrepreneur, I still felt that something was missing in my life, and that was my passion for the stars. While I kept my dream alive in my heart and continued to study and learn about space, I wanted to do more. I didn’t want to become one of those people who would just complain about what’s wrong in this world—I wanted to do something about it and to change it. Sometimes it is easier to take risk when you have very little to lose, but as a successful entrepreneur, taking risk and daring to do big things takes on a whole new meaning. I think most people in my shoes would have given up on their so-called crazy dream and stayed in their comfort zone instead of stepping out and facing uncertainty and potential failure. But for me, it wasn’t just a dream. It was a burning passion that gave me a sense of purpose and direction in life.

I’ve always believed that if you want something bad enough in your heart, the universe conspires to help you achieve it. I consider myself a very lucky person, as one of the few who is living out a childhood dream, but as Louis Pasteur said: “Chance favors a prepared mind.” For me, a series of fortunate events led me to Star City, Moscow, and ultimately, to the stars.

It all started with meeting Peter Diamandis, the founder of X Prize Foundation. He is, like me, crazy about outer space, and wanted to do something about opening up access to space. Peter had launched a $10 million competition for anyone not affiliated with a government agency to build a spaceship that could go to space twice within two weeks. It sounded crazy, but to me it was the first opportunity to be part of changing the future for millions of people who shared my dream of space travel.

Peter came to visit us and tell us about his prize, and without hesitation, we saw the value in what he was doing and partnered up with him. The prize was launched as the Ansari X Prize and had twenty-six teams competing from seven countries, each with their own unique and innovative approach on how they would reach one hundred kilometers into space. Ultimately, in a great historic moment, the team from Mojave Aerospace won the prize in October of 2004. After their success, no one would ever again question the power of a small group of focused innovators to achieve seemingly impossible tasks.

On that same day, Virgin Galactic was born, and we knew that our goal of launching a new industry was achieved. Many changes have occurred as a result of the prize, as well as all of the regulatory reform that came from our efforts with the X Prize. NASA started warming up to partnership with small private companies as well as using incentive prizes to bring a wide range of innovative approaches to solve many technical challenges.

On the first anniversary of the Ansari X Prize, I got an invitation to go learn about the Russian space program and train as a backup. I couldn’t have been happier. Even though it was one of the coldest winters in Moscow, I didn’t care. This was my chance to be part of the space program and get one step closer to my dream. Many people told me I was crazy—that I’d freeze in the Moscow winter, that training on a Russian military base alone was not safe. They even questioned my sanity, but I didn’t care. I was like a kid in a candy store: I couldn’t wait to get on the plane and meet all of the astronauts and cosmonauts in person, to walk in the hallways where Yuri Gagarin walked, to visit where Tereshkova—the first woman in space—prepared for her historic mission. To me, this was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I would not miss it.

So I went and trained as hard as I could. I was faced with some resistance when I first arrived in Star City, but after a couple of months of hard work, when they realized how serious I was about my training and how passionate I was, all of the instructors became my best friends and advocates. I worked tirelessly and trained for nine months as a backup for a Russian Soyuz mission to the International Space Station—and just three weeks before the flight, I was told that a primary crew member failed one of his medical exams and that I could take his seat.

I spent eleven glorious days in space. I saw Earth as a beautiful blue ball in the vast velvety darkness of space and felt its warmth and energy. I saw a sunset and a sunrise every ninety minutes, and billions of shining stars surrounded us.

There is nothing else like it out there. When you look at Earth from above, you have a new perspective. You can see how insignificant we are compared to the universe that surrounds us, and even more, how insignificant the things we fight over are. Floating in space, from my safe haven among the stars, I saw a world without division—just one Earth—in a vast universe. From my vantage point, the boundary lines separating countries and people had become blurred and then invisible. I knew that back on Earth these imaginary lines were very much present and causing all sorts of problems—but up there, the lines did not matter, did not exist.

Back on Earth, I am focused on my new company, Prodea Systems, which was launched on the same day I launched into space. At Prodea, we are trying to change how people use technology and make it easy and seamless so everyone, from any place, using any device, can enjoy and benefit from the use of technology. As I work to bring this to people all over the world, I am constantly reminded of that beautiful image of our planet and how we are all the same, with similar wants and needs.

In parallel, through my work with the X Prize Foundation and other organizations, I continue to make space more accessible to everyone so that anyone who wants to can have the opportunity to experience what I experienced. I want to make access to space safe and inexpensive so that we can fully benefit from the resources in space to better our lives here on Earth. We have also expanded the use of incentive prizes to solve the biggest challenges humanity faces. Whether at the bottom of the ocean or out in space, in the smallest building block of our bodies or the depth of the sun, we’re turning every challenge into an opportunity to advance human life and make our planet a better place for all of us to live together.

We live in a unique time, one that may become a pivotal point in the history of mankind. As humans, never before have we had so much potential to build or to destroy, to grow and seed the universe with our species or to annihilate, to give life or propagate death. Over centuries we have mastered skills and technologies that have given us enormous individual power and shrunk time and space between us, but with great power comes great responsibility, and we must use our imaginations to take risks, break all the boundaries, and challenge the status quo. We cannot be afraid because fear is death—a life in fear is a life not lived. Take it from someone who has been all the way down in the gutter and all the way up to the stars, someone who has gone from one high to a new low and then back up again. The journey is life, and how we live it is our choice. Let’s make the journey worthwhile.

CS Teachers on the Front Line in Protecting Student Privacy

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Pat Phillips

Data, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and privacy appear in the news nearly a daily. The article, “Privacy, Data Combination, and Why PII Can Be a Red Herring,” caused me to think about how valuable you as a CS teacher can be in helping other teachers, administrators, and school boards in making decisions about the companies and tools being used to store student data…including grades, educational programming labels, subjective assessments, and comments.

You are probably one of the more informed individuals in your school when it comes to understanding data and how it can be analyzed and used. You probably also have a deeper than typical understanding of where data can end up as revealed in the privacy policies of these companies and tools regarding user ownership and control of their data.

I must admit that this article made the hair on the back of neck stand up. I had not thought about many of the implications and possibilities of student data escaping to the wild, nor the not-so-remote possibility that it can happen more easily than we might think.

The author, Bill Fitzgerald, suggests that “we need to start looking at privacy, data collection, the lack of understanding of abusive dynamics, trends of tech and EdTech funding by venture capitalists, as related.” Even though privacy issues can seem overwhelming, as a CS educator not only do you understand data concepts but are able to help others understand the fine print and think about the questions to ask before putting student data in the hands of third party companies. Fitzgerald offers several suggestions for addressing privacy issues:

We start improving privacy when we call out abusive dynamics online.
We start improving privacy when we let a vendor know we will not be using their app with students because of their privacy policies.
We start improving privacy when we talk to our colleagues about how privacy – and respect for student data – informs our tech choices.
We start improving privacy when we talk to our schools, our school boards, and our elected officials about the ways that current practice needs to improve.

Let us know about your experiences and challenges in protecting student data.

Pat Phillips
Editor, The CSTA Voice

You Can Be An Advocate!

Posted on July 9, 2014 by Myra Deister

Yes, you can! If I can be an advocate you can be one too! It is not difficult to get started. I began by advocating at my school site for computer science with the counseling staff and the administration to help grow enrollment. I continue to advocate with administration because, as we all know, they are more mobile than teachers.

You can be an advocate at your school site. My school has a new principal coming on board in a few days. He held site meetings after he was informed that he was hired for the position. He was reviewing with the faculty all of the “programs” that he was aware of on the campus and what they were accomplishing. I reminded him that he had failed to mention my program. When asked about my program I filled him in on what was happening with computer science and I continue to send him short informative emails about computer science news.

You can be an advocate with your local legislators. I tried unsuccessfully last year to have the California state legislature recognize Computer Science Education week. I was told that I had contacted my local representatives too late. This year I started earlier. My local legislator agreed to take on the task of getting legislation passed. I was asked to supply some sample language. I found sample language on the CS Ed Week website and sent it to him. I learned a couple of weeks ago that it passed! For those in California the legislation is ACR 108 and here is a link to the press release.

You can be an advocate with teachers. The ed tech community is a great place to start. I attend Ed Camps because they are free and you can self-select the sessions. Each of the Ed Camps I have attended has had at least one session on coding. I make a point of attending that session and I urge the teachers to join CSTA to get more resources. I also add information about free resources for teachers. Follow this link for more information about Ed Camps and their list of Conferences.

Another teacher group you can be an advocate to is your local ISTE affiliate. For California, that group is CUE. I have spoken at their local conferences on integrating computer science into the elementary and middle school curriculum and have urged the teachers to join CSTA. They also included me on a Twitter Chat devoted to Hour of Code when I asked what CUE could do to support CS Ed Week and Hour of Code. After Hour of Code, the state organization devoted their entire magazine to coding. I wrote a letter to the editor thanking her for the great issue but I also suggested that they had missed some good resources. I was surprised when she offered to let me write a follow-up article. With the help of Patrice Gans and Chris Stephenson I wrote the article.

The teacher’s union is another group that I advocate to. I have not been as successful with that group, but I have attended sessions on CTE and have shared CSTA to their teachers at the session. I am also a member of the National Education Association CTE Caucus and will be attending the NEA Conference which begins in a few days in Denver. The CTE Caucus will have an information booth and I will have CSTA brochures and my business card available.

I have a listed a few things that I have done to advocate for computer science and CSTA. Please respond with what you have done to be an advocate.

Myra Deister
CSTA At-Large Representative

The CSTA Advocate Blog

Category Archives: Advocacy