After attending the CS Principles Summit in July, I was convinced that I needed to get this course started at my school site. The Summit was so informative and inspiring.

I had planned to attend the summit online, but due to some cancellations I was able to attend in person. If you were not able to attend either online or in person, you are not out of luck. You can view the agenda and links to the recorded sessions.

The Summit began with Deborah Seehorn’s introductory remarks summarizing the rationale for the CS Principles course and welcomed all of the participants that were attending in person and virtually. Chris Stephenson also added her introductory remarks.

Fran Trees and Owen Astracan discussed the history and development of the CS Principles course. There were some audio issues. The first few minutes you cannot hear Owen speaking but hang in there the audio does return. Then Fran spoke about the course outline. I will be using this document at the computer science curriculum meeting that I am attending this week to promote CS Principles. I also plan on forwarding it to my principal. He had offered to inquire about the process to offer the course as a pilot. My plan is to begin recruiting for the course to offer it Fall 2015. I am also actively recruiting other schools in the district to pilot the course next year because currently only 2 high schools out of 6 offer computer science courses.

Jeff Gray and Kelly Powers were next on the Agenda. They discussed information that could be used for recruiting. The information was very informative.

Next on the agenda was Flash Talks. There were audio issues again so I would fast forward the video 5 minutes to the point where audio returns. The pilot teachers discuss successes and challenges resulting from CS Principles. The resources by presenter with their links are:

• Fran Trees
• Carol Yarbrough
• Andy Kuemmel
• Seth Pizzo

Lien Diaz and Rich Kick are the presenters for the next session. Lien discusses statistics behind why the course has been developed as a future AP course. Her slides are available. The participants had an opportunity to ask their questions. Lien and Rich answered each question. Rich is a pilot teacher and his resources are available here.

The session facilitated by Emmanuel Schanzer and Rebecca Dovi was the one that really started by thought process about how to get this course started at my school and in my district. They presented a set of questions we were expected to answer in our group. The groups presented their responses in the next session facilitated by Rich Kick.

The summit overall was a great experience for me. I had to opportunity to create a plan to ask my district to allow me to pilot the course next school year.

Myra Deister
CSTA At-large Representative

Some of the more interesting professional development events I have been to is recent years have been called EdCamps. Many of these are organized via the EdCamp wiki. EdCamps are a form of unconference. An unconference is a participant driven conference. Rather than the traditional format of a committee selecting speakers and topics in advance and attendees picking which to attend, the unconference is organized on the spot. Attendees arrive at the start and write down things they would like to present of facilitate. Other attendees vote, by indicating which events they would like to attend, and the various top selections are arranged into a schedule for the day. It works surprisingly well.

The other aspect of EdCamps is that they tend to be more interactive than traditional “pundit on the podium” presentations. Often presentations morph into broad or very narrow discussions depending on the participants.

The EdCamps I have attended have tended to focus very much on using technology in the classroom. Discussion of Maker Spaces, using social media in the classroom, and many more topics of interest are covered. What I see very little of is computer science related, or at least focused, presentations at these conferences. While I value the things I have learned at these EdCamps I keep thinking that a computer science focused EdCamp could be a valuable event for many of us.

These events are locally organized, very informal and require far less than the usual amount of resources a conference requires. Other they are held in schools, universities or even public spaces made available by companies. The Boston EdCamp has been held in space donated by Microsoft for example. All you really need is a couple of rooms for sessions and a central space to do the initial registration (always good to know who is there) and presentation selection. They can be large or small and run all day or part of a day. Personally I think they would make a great CSTA chapter event that would promote both professional development and community building. I’d welcome some feedback on the idea. Would you attend one? Have you attended one? What do you like or not like about this idea?

Alfred Thompson
At-large Member – CSTA Board

An upcoming documentary by CODE explores the dearth of female and minority software engineers and explores the reasons for this gender gap. A “teaser” of the film is available here. Take a look…you will see many familiar faces!

CODE raises the question: What would society gain from having more women and minorities code?

This is an interesting question to ponder…. It might make a great journal entry and follow-up discussion for your class. I can envision it at the beginning of lessons related to the CS Principles big Idea 7: Global Impact with its emphasis on innovation. Or maybe in lessons related to careers, programming, or creativity.

If you are looking for more ideas for equity projects, check out their blog and other spots on the site.

Pat Phillips
Editor, CSTA Voice

When we think about the first computers to produce useful information for mankind, our mind usually goes to the 1940s: the conceptual Turing machine, the ENIAC, vacuum tubes and punched cards…we may even bring to mind the early analog computers of the late 19th – early 20th century. What is not widely known is that the ancient Greeks used computers as early as 100 BC!

One such ancient computer is the Antikythera mechanism, named after a Greek island in the Aegean Sea where it was recovered in a shipwreck off the island’s coast. Dated to the second half of the 2nd century BC, the mechanism contained at least 30 gearwheels as well as axles and other components of which 7 large fragments and 75 minor pieces have survived. The Antikythera mechanism was used to predict solar and lunar eclipses, kept an accurate calendar of many years, and displayed the dates of the Pan-Hellenic games, which included the Olympic Games and were held in various locations in Ancient Greece. It cannot be said whether the mechanism retrieved in the Antikythera shipwreck was “one-of-its-kind” or if other such contraptions were in use in the Hellenistic period.

The Antikythera Mechanism is kept in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece. I was fortunate enough to see the artefact in a travelling exhibition in Thessaloniki in 1997, the year in which the city was the Cultural Capital of Europe. What I did not know however before writing this piece was that a working replica of the Mechanism has been made out of… Legos! Fascinated by the device’s sophisticated technology, Andrew Carol, an Apple Software engineer, used Lego Technic pieces and a modular assembly system to produce a modern-day Antikythera Mechanism. By adapting the Mechanism’s gear ratios to Lego Technic standards, Carol produced a working machine with 110 gears and 7 differentials…in fact, his project has made quite a stir and requests have been made for his prototype to be produced as a Lego kit!

Further reading on the Antikythera Mechanism: The National Archaeological Museum of Greece, The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, Wikipedia
Technical details of Andrew Carol’s Lego version: Building Complex Machines Using LEGO

Mina Theofilatou
International Representative CSTA Board of Directors
Kefalonia, Greece

Are you a Maker? Do you even know what that is? And how, exactly, is this related to Computer Science? The exact lineage of the Maker Movement is debatable. The idea of making things, hacking, repurposing, and doing things by hand is a long human tradition. It’s also a long tradition within Computer Science. Popular Mechanics and The Home Brew Computer Club come to mind as well known examples of the culture of making as it applies to technology and computing. But recently, Making, as embodied to some extent by MAKE magazine and their Maker Faires, has been making new inroads into our lives, and especially into education.

In education, making, makerspaces and fablabs have been primarily focused on STEM (or STEAM) disciplines, arguing that current educational practice has made these subjects too abstract and too much about rote memorization. To really learn these subjects, students must participate in active, hands-on learning, the argument goes. The idea of making in education has come to be called by many, makered. Educators will recognize in makered the tenets of a constructivist approach to teaching and learning and CS educators in particular might recognize the work of Seymour Papert lurking behind much of the discussion of bringing making into the classroom.

In some circles, makered has become synonomous with 3D printing, electronics, building robots, and working with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi’s. But many de-emphasize the technology involved in making and focus on the active nature of building something, whether with electronics or cardboard, especially in schools where expensive technology equipment is out of reach. The tension between physical products and digital ones or some combination of digital and physical makes makered an interesting topic to explore in CS Education.

In recent years, CS Education has begun to emphasize the big concepts of Computer Science rather than being solely focused on programming as the one way into CS concepts. Activities and assignments that are part of CS curriculum often leave out the computer altogether and teach such things as loops and sorting algorithms using objects, board games, and even people. Like maker educators, CS teachers see the value in creating and using physical objects and active techniques to teach concepts. Philosophically, these two groups of teachers, are not far apart at all.

Broadly speaking, many maker educators are also CS educators, especially in the early grades. Elementary and middle schools have added makerspaces and maker programs as a way to incorporate CS into their curriculum. But there are some maker educators who are librarians, English teachers, science teachers, history teachers, who have no CS background and sometimes face the prospect of now having to create a project that involves programming. They come to CS out of necessity. On the flip side, some CS educators are tied to programming and digital products as their sole purview and shun the idea of having to work with electronics and hardware, much less cardboard and glitter. Maker educators are always looking to learn from CS educators and I think CS educators can learn a lot from their maker counterparts.

Making, or if you prefer, physical computing, offers an engaging way to introduce or extend Computer Science. From using Hummingbird Robotics kits to make Artbotics projects to building sophistaced Arduino projects, there’s a wide range of skills that students can gain from combining physical objects with computation. Working with physical objects that people actually use is a both an engineering and a human-computer interface challenge. Printing a surround for an Arduino project involves thinking three-dimensionally and learning about scale in a way that’s not at all abstract. Even creating a Rube Goldberg machine, as my Physical Computing class did last year, involves the same kind of problem solving and logic that programming requires. Paper crafts and sewing are also popular kinds of projects that can be combined with computing, thanks to small and sewable computing products like the Lilypad and Gemma Arduino. And these kinds of projects, as Yasmin Mafai pointed out in her CSTA 2014 keynote, are appealing to girls, making them a great way to engage more young women in Computer Science.

It’s worth trying a maker project in your CS class, whether it’s something that combines the digital with the physical, like programming an Arduino to fill your dog’s food dish, or something completely physical like a Rube Goldberg machine. You’ll be surprised by how fun they are and by how much students learn from doing them. And if you’re interested in learning more about makered, join me on Tuesdays at 9 P.M. EST for my #makered Twitter chat.

Resources:

• Invent to Learn, by Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez
• MAKE magazine
• Instructables
• Adafruit
• Sparkfun
• #makered Twitter chat

Laura Blankenship
9-12 Representative, CSTA Board of Directors