0 Rediscovering the Passion, Beauty, Joy, Awe" of Computer Science

This session was originally driven by the computing crisis and discusses what we should do. We should always ask our students what they want to learn & what inspires them.

UCB: The Beauty and Joy of Computing - inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs10

• - history, limits, future and social implications of computing
• - apps that changed the world
• - "how it works" sessions
• - current events in programming
• - abstraction, algorithms, data, programming paradigms, concurrency, AI, ..

created a version of Scratch that allows functions -- will be available this summer! yayy!

The first speaker discussed the Exploring Computer Science curriculum.

Leigh Sudol was the second speaker ...

• There's an app for that (facebook, iphone, android)
• Is your class a Google story? LOL. great approach. "Computer science is not about creating a program that already exists." If I can google a working example of an assignment, faster than a student can open Eclipse, it shouldn't be an assignment."
• Things with no right answer. Ex - Greeps, Battleship (students have to write the player for the game, given gui)
• Teach a bigger CS Concept (embedded breadth) - blackjack teaches machine learning.
• "Just one piece" of Research - have ur students implement just a small piece of the project

Next speaker was Orit Hazzan (Israel Institute of Technology) who talked about teamwork in undergraduate CS classes. This is something interesting, because teamwork is discouraged in most CS classrooms.

And lastly, Maggie Johnson, who is from Google.

My mind was stuck on Leigh Ann Sudol's comment about is your class a "Google Story?" (So I didn't quite hear much after her presentation, sorry!) In other words, can students find the solution to your programming problems and assignments by a simple Google search? HS Teachers typically teach the AP CS (programming) curriculum and it can be difficult to show students the PBJA of computing, specifically when it deals with current technologies. Where do we find the time to learn it? Teach it? I think that at a basic level, YES - we can create some interesting programming assignments, but new technologies and applications are coming to the forefront on a regular basis. I would love to teach my students how to develop facebook apps, android apps, blackberry apps and the like --- but this takes time and money.

It would be great to have a portal for unique and innovative lesson plans using the new technologies.

I challenged the college/university faculty members in the audience to reach out to high school teachers and share their resources. If your developing a new course, share with us (teachers)! If you have a unit on mobile phone applications, let a teacher sit on your class!!

signing off ... but this was another interesting PBJA session. Yayy!