Can we create K-12 engineering standards?

The issues being raised here are pretty similar for computing.  Should we create computing standards for K-12?  Like engineering, computing cuts across the curriculum, and like engineering, it’s not clear that we can ramp up the infrastructure enough to achieve rigorous standards.

With efforts to ensure U.S. competitiveness in a global economy revolving around stronger STEM education, some policy makers are looking at whether it makes sense to include engineering standards for K-12 education. But the ability to establish a national set of standards for K-12 engineering education might still be out of reach, according to a new study from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

The study, “Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?” claims that “although the main ideas in K-12 engineering education are largely agreed upon, data based on rigorous research on engineering learning at the K-12 level are still not sufficient to develop learning progressions that could be reflected as standards.”

via Study points to uncertainty of K-12 engineering standards | Curriculum | eSchoolNews.com.

GameBoy Emulation in JavaScript

This is computing education in the same way that the Lisp-in-Python hack was: Really fascinating things to think with, and ways of getting into powerful computing ideas.

JavaScript is often perceived as a Web scripting language, with a specialist purpose of manipulating HTML pages. JavaScript is, however, a general-purpose Turing-complete language: the best way to illustrate this is to emulate another system through JavaScript. In the first of a series of articles, I’ll look at how a CPU can be emulated through JS, and start building an emulation core for the GameBoy console.

via Imran Nazar: GameBoy Emulation in JavaScript.