Category: Coding

Change the World with Computer Science!

11/5/2019

Image of a globe with a setting sun includes logos for hour of code, Grant Wood AEA, and the Digital leearning team.

Computer Science for Good. #CSforGood

Inspired by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the 2019 Hour of Code theme will highlight how we can all use computer science to make a positive impact on our world, from writing apps to solve a local problem, to using innovative ideas in data science to address global challenges.

Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries during Computer Science Education Week December 9 - 15, 2019. Help us celebrate by hosting an hour of code this year! We’ve put together resources to help teachers, coaches, and administrators from Pre-K to high school host events in their classrooms and buildings. Visit our team’s Hour of Code resource page for everything you need to start changing the world!

Here's a short list of steps to help get your 2019 Hour of Code event going:

Register ✍🏾

We invite Grant Wood AEA schools to register your event with us! We’ll send you stickers and certificates to spread the word before and celebrate after. You should also register at the Hour of Code site for a chance to win robots or circuits!

Plan Your Event📝

Use the planning guide to make sure your event is a success!

Select Activities 💻

Search the Hour of Code activities page or check out our Smores that highlight ways to integrate Computer Science into the content areas. Each content area resource highlights activities for elementary, middle school, and high school learners and includes some of our favorite unplugged and online activities.

Connect with a Professional 📞

Did you know that Computer Science Professionals are available to support your event in person or virtually? Grant Wood AEA schools should contact Gary Vogt from the Regional IT Sector Board at gary.vogt@kirkwood.edu to arrange a face to face volunteer from local computer science and information technology professionals.

Start the Conversation 🌎

Code.org created this guide to help get the computer science for good conversation started in your classroom.

Share your Impact 📱

We'd love to see your students innovative ideas to change the world on social media! Share their problem solving and learning with the hashtags #CSforGood, #HourOfCode #CSforGWAEA, and #CSforIA.

- Corey Rogers (@corey_rogers)

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Ready to Launch? Beebot Curriculum Written By Engineering Students

10/21/2019

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At ITEC 2018, I had the lucky opportunity to meet ITEC student volunteer and Iowa State student, Dagney Paskach, when she crashed our Makey Makey session, because she just wanted learn more.

Through our conversation, she shared with me that she was part of a team that wrote curriculum connecting Beebots and the NASA missions. She asked, "Would I be interested in learning more?" Um...YES!!

So, please read on to learn more about how how this group of engineering students wrote Creative Commons licensed curriculum for elementary students that you can use with your students to fuel excitement around space missions.
Enjoy!
~Amber Bridge

Cardinal Space Mining Club (CSM) is a student organization at Iowa State University dedicated to designing, building, and testing a robot to dig regolith, simulated Lunar soil as part of the NASA Robotic Mining Competition. As part of the competition, teams are also tasked with doing educational outreach within their communities. We love getting kids excited about STEM because we know that the younger kids get interested in STEM, the more likely they are to pursue it as a career. Two years ago, CSM had the pleasure of partnering with the first-grade teaching team at Ocotillo Elementary School in Phoenix, Arizona, to design curriculum for a week-long space robotics unit for the class of 93 first-grade students.

Our advisor’s niece was one of the first grade teachers at Ocotillo Elementary School. She reached out to us and asked us to help her think of the best way to teach her students how to code, so we initially started thinking about which robotics sets would be a good match. Bee-Bots are a great tool for teaching coding to first-graders who have never programmed before: the robots are programmed by pressing the buttons directly on the robot, so the students can see an obvious connection between the time when they give the robot instructions and they see the robot carry them out; there are no words, so reading level is not a barrier to entry as it is in most block-based coding tools; and they are fun to play with!

For us, providing context is a key component when working with students. Bee-Bots come with a plain white mat. This is nice, but we wanted to build a story for the Ocotillo students that they would get excited about, so they would feel intrinsically motivated to learn how to code. We realized we needed to expand from just designing one lesson to planning an entire week of curriculum. With “Mission: Martian Base, An Adventure in Space, Robotics, and Coding with Bee-Bots” we immersed the students in NASA robotics.
The last lesson in the unit was the mission. We designed and printed our own custom double-sided Bee-Bot mat, and mapped out six challenges the students needed to complete to build their Martian Base. The first two missions are on the first side of the mat, which has a map of a launch site on Earth. On the other side of the mat, there is a picture of the surface of Mars. To provide additional context, we decided to make the Bee-Bots look like rovers instead of bees. We designed and 3D printed covers for the Bee-Bots using a MakerBot 3D printer.

CSM adapted “Mission: Martian Base” to Iowa standards in 2019, and the unit is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. For Grant Wood AEA schools, you can access the curriculum through the Grant Wood AEA Media Center. Click on the Supplemental Lesson Button when you search for "Bee-Bot." If you don't have Bee-Bot, from here you can check out Bee-Bots for your school. You can also reach out to your digital learning representative as we have the mats & 3D files already printed.

To support NASA’s initiative to promote the Artemis missions, we are currently designing new custom mats and challenges for the Bee-Bots to show kids they are the Artemis generation. Students will program their Bee-Bots to drive to designated locations on the mat where they will discover new things about the moon. This new curriculum will also eventually be available for public use as well.

The key takeaway is that Bee-Bots and other educational robotics tools have so much potential beyond what comes in the box. Through our outreach, we have found that students are most excited when we can tell a story and connect their learning to concrete, real-world applications using the content we want to teach, and then find the best technology (if necessary) to support that content learning.

Dagney Paskach, Cardinal Space Mining Outreach Co-Coordinator
@ISUSpaceMining

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Iowa has Computer Science Standards!

10/18/2018

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Why do students need to learn computer science? Well, let’s start with the numbers. According to the Code.org website, there are 4,328 open computing jobs with salaries averaging at $77,486. With only 364 computer science graduates from Iowa in 2015, it’s clear that there is a need for knowledgeable and skilled computer scientists in our state.

Those statistics certainly attract attention! Perhaps more important for students and educators, is the fact that technology has become an integral part of our daily lives and classrooms. Many students and teachers, alike, carry computers in our pockets (also known as phones) and educators deliver instruction and measure student understanding with apps and tools such as FlipGrid, Dash & Dot, and SeeSaw. Those don’t exist without computer science.

It’s important, no matter the career eventually pursued, that students have foundational knowledge of the core concepts of computer science. This basic understanding of computer science concepts enables students to be informed consumers and creators of technology. Engaging students in computer science learning provides opportunity for student to use coding to solve problems, collaborate with peers, and communicate their stories and understandings with world. Whether those understanding be directly tied to standards, learning targets, or student interests, computer science and coding helps kids change the world.

Picture of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki with quote

The Iowa State Board of Education adopted voluntary statewide Computer Science standards in June 2018 to support teachers and students with computer science education. This adoption was based on the recommendation of the Computer Science Standards Review Team which was made up of Iowans serving in K-12 school systems, higher education, business and related industry. The board adopted the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards which were developed by the Computer Science Teachers Association, or CSTA. According to the CSTA website, the standards:

“...delineate a core set of learning objectives designed to provide the foundation for a complete computer science curriculum and its implementation at the K–12 level. To this end, the CSTA Standards:

Introduce the fundamental concepts of computer science to all students, beginning at the elementary school level.
Present computer science at the secondary school level in a way that can fulfill a computer science, math, or science graduation credit.
Encourage schools to offer additional secondary-level computer science courses that will allow interested students to study facets of computer science in more depth and prepare them for entry into the work force or college.
Increase the availability of rigorous computer science for all students, especially those who are members of underrepresented groups.

The standards have been written by educators to be coherent and comprehensible to teachers, administrators, and policy makers.”

The Iowa Computer Science standards are comprised of five concepts and seven practices.

Computer Science Standards Core Concepts and Practices graphic

The core concepts help to organize and highlight the five overarching domains of computer science and outline criteria for student understanding throughout their K-12 career.

Many educators, students, and parents are aware of the Algorithm and Programming core concept thanks to organizations like Code.org, events like the Hour of Code, and programming languages like Scratch from the MIT Media Lab. This core concept includes subconcepts such as variables, control, algorithms, and program development and is commonly called “coding.”

There are countless opportunities to connect the Computer Science concepts with core discipline standards, such as using Data and Analysis in Science courses, Impacts of Computing in Social Studies, and Algorithms and Programming in Math. We’ll highlight opportunities to connect the Computer Science core concepts and practices with discipline standards and practice, provide specific examples, and highlight students and educators currently engaging with the standards in future blog posts. Use the hashtags #CSforGWAEA and #CSforIA on social media to join the conversation.

Corey Rogers (@corey_rogers)
Digital Learning Consultant, Grant Wood AEA

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GWAEA Digital Learning December Update

12/6/2016

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Link to the December Update
In the Update:

Hour of Code Going on Now
Latest episode of the EdTech Takeout
Latest episode of Think, Make, Innovate, the makerspace show
PD Opportunities, Google Expeditions, SeeSaw in the Classroom, EdCamp Iowa
January Seminar Series - All Means ALL! Creating Equitable Learning Environments
Clarity Highlight- Teachers administer digital or online assessments to a majority of their students

~Stacy Behmer, Coordinator of Digital Learning - @sbehmer +StacyBehmer
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Lights, Drones, Action! A Coding App to Tickle You Pink!

3/31/2015

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When you find something cool that Adam Bellow likes, the chances are high that you will like it too! For me, this truism manifested itself recently in the form of a tweet Adam sent declaring his love for the recently released Tickle app for iOS. Tickle is a free coding app for the iPad that lets students create programs to control Spheros, Air Parrot Drones, and even Philips Hue Lights. Intrigued? I thought you might be! Here's what you need to know.

Tickle started as a Kickstarter campaign, and uses block coding elements that were inspired by the likes of Scratch, Tynker, Blockly and Hopscotch. The simple coding interface is accessible enough to be used with early elementary students, but it has enough potential to challenge middle school students and beyond. Programs can be written and tested in the app without connecting to any other devices, but connecting to a Sphero or an Air Parrot Mini Drone is where the real fun begins.

While I would love to have tested it on a drone, we didn't have one to hand. However, we do have some Sphero balls, so I set to work building a simple program to put Tickle to the test. It's easy to get started. Simply choose a template for the device you want to write a program for and drag the blocks you need to the canvas. There are various categories for each type of block you might want to add, and mistakes can easily be undone with the undo arrow, or by dragging errant blocks to the left-hand side of your screen. You can also access the in-app help by tapping the question mark at any time.

If you have programmed a Sphero before, you will most likely have used the Sphero Macrolab app. This is the native app that Sphero built for programming Spheros and Ollies, but it is not nearly as easy on the eye as Tickle is. There are definitely some similarities in the kinds of things you can make a Sphero do, but Tickle is more visual, and, in my opinion at least, it is also much easier to use.

You can also use Tickle to create fun video games. The Flappy Batman demo that comes with the game is an example of what that might look like, and these types of projects could be a great additional activity for classrooms that may not have enough Spheros for all students, or for specific coding challenges like the ones you find in apps like Hopscotch.

So, there is a lot to like about the new Tickle app for iPad. It is yet another fantastic coding app for the iPad, and one that deserves a place on the home screen of your school iPads.

~ Jonathan Wylie, Technology Consultant

For more posts like this, please subscribe to our blog! You can also connect with us on social media if you Like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter or add us to your circles on Google+.

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Change the World with Computer Science!

Computer Science for Good. #CSforGood

Register ✍🏾

Plan Your Event📝

Select Activities 💻

Connect with a Professional 📞

Start the Conversation 🌎

Share your Impact 📱

Ready to Launch? Beebot Curriculum Written By Engineering Students

Iowa has Computer Science Standards!

GWAEA Digital Learning December Update

Lights, Drones, Action! A Coding App to Tickle You Pink!

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