What are you doing for Grace Hopper Day?
Every year around Admiral Grace Murray Hopper's (12/9/1906) and Ada Lovelace's, aka Augusta Ada Byron Countess of Lovelace, (12/10/1815) birthdays, I conduct an in-school Field Trip for the Honors Math classes to my PC Classroom/Lab to talk about taking AP Computer Science next year. In recent years, this has coincided with The Hour Of Code and CSED Week sponsored by code.org promoting Computer Science education in grades K-12.
This year code.org has lots of new tutorials for CS ED Week, aka The Hour Of Code. I think I'll do these with my own classes too. I'm trying to get teachers to sign up their students for my Field Trip on Wednesday 12/6/2017. Since I don't have a lot of Seniors this year, I'm also going to show some of these tutorials to my own classes on Monday 12/4/2017 as a trial run.
I could show the Disney Frozen tutorial on 12/7/16. There's so many good tutorials to choose from. Maybe I'll show the Star Wars tutorial? Wait, Angry Birds look fun too! Karel The Dog was fun last year! I could do a different tutorial each period!
There's a new tutorial based on the TI nSpire CX CAS that I may use for my AP Calculus BC class. That link also has a tutorial for the TI-84! One problem with these tutorials is that they are teacher driven. So, the teacher needs to know about programming in general and TI-BASIC in particular. Most of the other code.org tutorials are student centered with videos to keep them on track.
We use the nSpire every day in AP Calculus. We even code with TI-BASIC on the nSpire. We've written code for solving Quadratic Equations and for Newton's Method. Soon, we'll be writing code for Riemann Sums and Euler's method too! So, maybe I'll show this tutorial on MATHLAB instead!
The new tutorial on Processing would be perfect for my AP Computer Science class as we have been doing console based programming all year so far and we're thinking of switching to graphics based programming soon. The only issue with the Processing tutorial is that it will most definitely take more than and hour. Daniel Siffman, put together a nice intro but he sure likes to talk! I may take a couple of days on this one!
What follows is a description of what we did for CS ED Week, aka The Hour Of Code, aka Admiral Grace Murray Hopper Day, aka Lady Ada Lovelace's Birthday last year. This year we are doing much the same thing. Our goal here is twofold. (1) Promote Computer Science Education in general. (2) Recruit more students for the APCS class next year!
Last year was based on this Hour Of Code Tutorial from codehs.com. This year I'd like to try this or this tutorial from code.org.
I'd like to do the code.org tutorials with my AP classes as they saw the codehs.com tutorials last year. Also, code.org has an Angry Birds tutorial and and a Disney's Frozen tutorial. So, I can do one in the morning with AP Calculus and the other in the afternoon with AP Computer Science as I have some of the same students in each. For students who have not done The Hour of Code with me, codehs.com's Karel the Dog is an easier intro. Codehs.com has two new tutorials. One is on mySQL and Harry Potter which is a little dry. The other is on making graphics with JavaScript which is a little challenging. I also like the code.org tutorials because they feature experts in the video tutorials like Bill Gates and Mark Zukerburg teaching about if/then/else branches and repeat/until loops! Here's some videos from code.org:
CSEDWEEK was an unprecedented international effort last year. Over 15,000,000 students at more than 30,000 locations (mostly schools) in nearly 200 countries were registered to participate and wrote more than 500,000,000 lines of code!
In fact, every single class I teach, every single day of the week, is devoted to some aspect of STEM! STEM stands for "Science, Technology, Engineering and Math." Actually, I try to incorporate STEAM into my classroom: "Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math." By Arts I do mean Art (fractals, 3D graphics, animation) but I also try to tie in plenty of History, Literature and Culture.
Mine is one of the few High Schools in the USA to offer a Computer Science curriculum! CS50 at Harvard, see playlist above, covers a lot of the same material we cover here at Baldwin Senior High in my AP Computer Science class. They use Scratch, C, php and JavaScript whereas we use Python, SAGE, MPI and Java, but the concepts are the same!
Sadly, the United States is falling far behind other countries in training professionals for jobs in the 21st Century that will require this skill more and more! So, in answer to this growing demand, here's what I teach (in addition to Math and Science):
Intro To Computer Science (python):
AP Computer Science A (java):
CIS: Computing Independent Study
(MPI with FORTRAN, C, C++ and python):
Calculus Research Lab (SAGE):
aka Scientific Computing Lab (Octave):
aka Computing Science Lab (R):
Course Selection Week DropBox
Hope that was helpful!
Well, that's all folks!
Generally Speaking,
A. Jorge Garcia
Applied Math, Physics & CompSci
Applied Math, Physics & CompSci
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