School begins on August 5 for students. Get off social media and get outside and see some beautiful swallowtails.
Last week, I attended a two-day Advance Kentucky workshop sponsored by KSTC (Kentucky Science and Technology Coorporation). Ten educators from across state worked on the upcoming AP Computer Science Principles course, scheduled to start 2016-2017. It is rare that AP offers a new course and this course would have less coding. The scope of this course would emphasize computational thinking practices ... global impact of computer science, abstracting, computational artifacts, forms of communication and project collaboration. Students will take an multiple choice exam that counts for 50% of their AP score and they will generated two performance events for the remaining 50%. The link for this course is below. We have been preparing to launch this course next year. Computer Programming II is this effort. Last year, we got a good start ... Scratch, Python, Arduino, Finch Robots, Raspberry Pi computers and more.
https://advancesinap.collegeboard.org/stem/computer-science-principles
https://scratch.mit.edu/
https://www.python.org/
http://www.kstc.com/
I have been taking a MOOC for this new course through the University of Alabama. The link is below. Most of you know how I feel about online courses ... especially if they are all like this one!
https://csp-cs4hs.appspot.com/preview
Finished a book on Ada Lovelace this week. Lord Byron's daughter that became a very good mathematician (when nearly all women were not allowed to participate in science and math) and a friend of Charles Babbage. A good historical read from an interesting time during the early 1800s in England.
First semester in our return to the 4 X 4 block, where we should have stayed ten years ago, I will be teaching Computer Programming I (Karel, Visual BASIC and Scratch), Computer Programming II (Scratch, SNAP, Python and a project rotation) and Selected Topics in Science for juniors (Biology, Astronomy, Earth Science, Chemistry, Physics and Computer Programming). This is a maker class with an abundance of labs.
Second semester I will be teaching AP Computer Science A (Karel J Robot, Greenfoot, BlueJ ... all JAVA) and two Selected Topics in Science classes.
Get outdoors and check it out!
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