Slashdot Mirror
$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!”
It may be convenient and tempting to blame Obama for this, but its actually something he benefits from thats existed for more than a hundred years. Namely, how wealth learns and lives as opposed to the rest of us.
While most of us go to public school, eat school lunches and attend public universities when and if possible, the cloistered elite do not. An entire parallel yet grossly superior system of education exists for millionaires and billionaires, and everything from its fundamentals to its lunchtime is radically different. While we are playing gym and learning typing in highschool, the children of wealth learn elocution, policy, and various other traits that help them to accept their future roles as C level management, elite constitutional law attorneys, and even members of world banking organizations. If obamas children are learning programming, its merely as a jovial introduction into the world of directing, managing, or guiding long-term and broad stroke efforts in the field. They will not themselves become a "programmer."
that having been said, the children of the elite will always benefit disproportionately from government grants alongside their already generous foundation and nonprofit donations. they have overwhelming resources to secure and exploit them that public, and many private institutions, do not.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Stop asking yourself how you can stop them from getting it and how we can get it for everybody else. All crap like this story does is get people yelling about govt waste. And all that happens when you try to cut it is your education budget for your kid's school gets cut.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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."
Apparently the rich plan to grow up to be code monkeys rather than hedge fund managers, CEOs or anonymous board members these days.
"part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way"
It has nothing to do with the teaching technique. You can't force people to become interested in computer science and programming. If you aren't the type of person who is naturally drawn towards this particular type of problem solving, you'll quickly be discouraged by the constant setbacks and frustration that accompany all programming endeavors. Very few people have the natural mathematical talent and abstract thinking abilities necessary to enjoy this work and thus overcome the first 5-10 years of pain and eventually become good.
"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.
That's ridiculous. Many, many people come to things later in life that they were initially turned off of by truly horrid teachers.
When I was in elementary I *HATED* maths and science because the way my teachers taught it was aggressively boring. It was all rote memorization of formulae and processes, and there was zero joy or excitement - they taught it like people who didn't actually know the material and were just reading from a teacher's guide, because that's exactly what they were.
We moved and I went to a better school, and I was STUNNED at how interesting the teachers were able to make subjects I previously hated and dreaded.
Flash forward to now and I've had a long career as both an engineer and a research scientist. Given my successful career, I'd say I definitely have a mind for it, which I might never have come to realize if I'd had to continue staying with shitty teachers who seemed to go out of their way to make it boring.
And I know a LOT of people who have had similar experiences. Dismissing a huge swath of people as somehow unworthy or incapable simply because they don't immediately become fascinated by a subject is absurd. Funny enough though, it's a pretty common attitude by people in tech.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.