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$500K NSF Grant Boosted Girls' CS Participation At Obama Daughters' $37K/Yr HS
theodp writes: On Friday, a paper entitled Creative Computation in High School will be presented at SIGCSE '16. "In this paper," explain the paper's authors, "we describe the success of bringing Creative Computation via Processing into two very different high schools...providing a catalyst for significant increases in total enrollment as well as female participation in high school computer science." One of the two schools that participated in the National Science Foundation-supported project — see NSF awards 1323305 & 1323463 for Creative Computation in the Context of Art and Visual Media — was Sidwell Friends School, which a 2013 SMU news release on the three-year, $500K NSF grant noted was best known as the school attended by President Obama's daughters. Interestingly, in a late-2014 interview, the President lamented that his daughters hadn't taken to coding the way he'd like, adding that "part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way." Hey, nothing that a $4B 'Computer Science For All' K-12 Program can't fix, right?
Why do they call it that?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way.
It's a feature, not a bug. Coding isn't interesting unless you have a mind for it. And if you have a mind for it, you don't need a creative teacher and colorful projects to make it interesting for you.
The children of elites tend to have parents who care about scholastics, which is far and away the most accurate predictor of scholastic success, not school quality, dollars per pupil, class size, teacher quality, or other irrelevancies Democrats and Republicans argue about.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm not sure the trend of 'making programming a game' is the best way to go about it....it works fine at the introductory levels, but how do you move beyond drag-and-drop programming blocks and start using text all the time? Are you going learn about NP-complete with pictures? I think at some point, the students need to develop a passion for solving puzzles, otherwise they will not have the desire to keep going.......
In any case, here is the curriculum they used:
1) programming (bouncing ball, kindergarten picture)
2) functions, variables, basic loops, 2D arrays (image processing)
3) fundamentals, control structures (Andy Wharhol, Green Screen)
4) algorithm development (finding the robots ball)
**At this point, the students are given a four-week introduction to Python** 5) OOP: classes, polymorphism, animation (bouncing ball, sea creature)
6) OOP and design (space invaders)
7) Abstraction Strings (data visualization)
8) OOP: interfaces (swimmable object, paint)
9) OOP: inheritance (sea creature inheritance)
10) Recursion (hanoi tower)
11) algorithm development, OOP: encapsulation (robot maze)
Personally I would rather see less emphasis on OOP, and more emphasis on "the proving mindset" (the proving mindset being, when you write code, try to think of everything that can go wrong, every possibility). It's kind of hard to understand when OOP is a good thing without writing bad code first.....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Who do you think is behind all this 'women are the same as men and therefore must be given men's jobs' bullshit? You'll notice that women aren't being given DANGEROUS jobs that men die while doing, like construction, foundry work, oil rig work, mining, you name it.
More JEWISH nation-wrecking.
They would rather throw money at the daughters of the upper end of the 1% than money at the sons of the bottom 50%. Because equality. Because a girl born to a family that can afford $37k/year/kid for K12 tuition is "oppressed" by the "patriarchy" that includes a poor white kid who lives in Appalachia with a dad on Social Security Disability and a mom works as a waitress at a low end restaurant and a minority boy living in a violent ghetto with no father in his life. No siree, those boys have it easy because their penises give them preferential access, should the heavens open up and give them access to an accredited college at some point in their lives. Fight for equality, fight for the daughters of the privileged!
Paris Hilton earns millions annually through TV, product endorsements, and her own brands. She has a net worth of over $100 million. Less than $5M of that came from her inheritance. She manages and invests her money well. I don't think she is as dumb as you think she is.
"part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way."
If someone needs to convince you that CS is interesting, then maybe CS is not for you. I've never known a really good programmer who got into the field because someone coddled and cajoled them into it. On the contrary, they seek out every opportunity they can find to learn more on their own initiative.