President Obama calls on every American to learn to code #CSedWeek

Pretty amazing that they got this!

Try an Hour of Code in an Ebook for #CSEdWeek

It’s CSEd Week this week. Code.org and Computing in the Core have effectively merged now, and that’s the organization that owns and promotes CSEd Week. The big focus this year is the Hour of Code — getting all students to do some kind of coding activity for one hour. There are a lot of tutorials now available at the CSEdWeek site.

As readers of this blog now, one of my research activities is to create an electronic book to support high school teachers learning computer science. (Here’s our project webpage.) We’ve been exploring ideas like how best to create videos about computer science (hint: use subgoal labels!) and how to reduce cognitive load (hint: Parson’s problems). We’re also working on multi-modal explanations (evidence suggests that audio narration for code is more effective than text descriptions) and worked examples.

Barb Ericson put together an Hour of Code activity using some of our ideas for learning Python with turtles here, as an Hour of Code activity: http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/IntroPythonTurtles/index.html. Please do try it and let us know what you think!

If you have an Hour of Code activity that isn’t making it to the main CSedWeek.org site, please feel free to link to it here in the comments!

CSTA Blog: Critical Questions for CS Ed Research #CSEdWeek

An interesting set of research questions!

This weekend CSTA Chair Deborah Seehorn and I were attending the ACM Education Council meetings and, as part of the meeting, we participated in a group discussion about critical questions in computer science education research led by CSTA Past Chair Steve Cooper.

Our discussion group consisted of Deborah Seehorn from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, Steve Cooper from Stanford University, Dan Garcia from Berkeley, and myself. Because we all have deep roots in K-12 computer science education, the list of questions we came up with covered a breadth of issues and reflect the deep need for research-grounded solutions to the issues we now face.

via Computer Science Teachers Association: Critical Questions for CS Education Research.