Thursday, November 1, 2018

What are you doing for Grace Hopper Day?

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 Computer Science Honors (CSH) or AP Computer Science (CSAP) 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 12/5/2018. 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 12/3/2018 as a trial run.

I could show the Disney Frozen tutorial. There's so many good tutorials to choose from. Maybe I'll show the Star Wars tutorial? Wait, Angry Birds looks 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. We even wrote code for Riemann Sums and Euler's method! So, maybe I'll show this tutorial on MATHLAB or Octave instead! 

Last year the Processing tutorial worked very well. 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! My Computer Science students have been using Processing alot this year, so I'll do SAGE with them.

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 CSH and CSAP classes next year!

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. Another nice tutorial is based on SQL and Harry Potter which is a little dry. Another tutorial is about making graphics with JavaScript which is a little challenging. I also like the code.org tutorials because they feature experts in the video tutorials such as Bill Gates and Mark Zukerburg teaching about if/then/else branches and repeat/until loops! 

Here's some videos from code.org:
Admiral Grace Murray Hopper is one of my personal idols! Not only did she usher in the entire industry of Software Engineering but she single handedly invented Computer Programming Languages! She was a Math Professor, a Naval Officer, the developer of COBOL and an all around class act! 
To honor Grace Hopper's memory, I registered all my classes for an Hour Of Code. Maybe you'd like to participate as well? The Hour Of Code is about exposing as many students as possible to Computer Science in all disciplines. I'm making this presentation during course selection week as well to encourage students to take Computer Science at my High School! 

 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!
I teach Computer Science and see it as a great tool in all disciplines. It's a shame that more students don't take Computer Science in High School. Taking Computer Science can lead to a great major in college and a great profession! I also use Computer Science in all my Math and Science courses in High School and College! 
I've been teaching people how to code since 1975. I've also been teaching AP Computer Science at the High School level since 1984. Finally, I've been teaching computing at the College level since 1993. Needless to say, I'm a vehement advocate for a strong Computer Science Education in particular and a challenging STEM curriculum in general for every High School student. 

 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!
A. Jorge Garcia

 
Applied Math, Physics & CompSci
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