Building blocks for powerful ideas: designing a programming language to teach the beauty and joy of computing

Snap! is a cloud-native graphical programming environment and an online community. It is the programming language made for UC Berkeley’s popular introductory CS course named “The Beauty and Joy of Computing”. Snap! is taught in colleges and high schools across the U.S. from Palo Alto to Philadelphia. It has been translated to more than 40 languages and is used around the world—from Göttingen to Beijing—for teaching and research. Snap! has been designed for inclusion. Its low floor welcomes beginners and its multi-media capabilities invite creative thinkers of all ages. At the same time, Snap! offers sophisticated abstractions that make it suitable for an intellectually rigorous introduction to computer science.Snap! es un entorno de programación gráfica nativo de la nube y una comunidad en línea. Es el lenguaje de programación creado para el popular curso introductorio de CS de UC Berkeley llamado “La belleza y la alegría de la informática”. Snap! se imparte en colegios y escuelas secundarias de los EE. UU., desde Palo Alto hasta Filadelfia. Se ha traducido a más de 40 idiomas y se utiliza en todo el mundo, desde Gotinga hasta Beijing, para la enseñanza y la investigación. Snap! ha sido diseñado para su inclusión. El nivel bajo le da la bienvenida a principiantes y sus capacidades multimedia que invitan a pensadores creativos de todas las edades. Al mismo tiempo Snap! ofrece abstracciones sofisticadas que lo hacen adecuado para una introducción intelectualmente rigurosa a la informática

Corporate influence and the academic computer science discipline. [3: Berkeley, public funds and private interests]

Prosopography of another major academic center for computer science, with the distinction of being a public place of learning and research..

Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies

How are digital humanists drawing on libraries and archives to advance research in the field of religious studies and theology? How can librarians and archivists make their collections accessible in return? This volume showcases the perspectives of faculty, librarians, archivists, and allied cultural heritage professionals who are drawing on primary and secondary sources in innovative ways to create digital humanities projects in the field

Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies

How are digital humanists drawing on libraries and archives to advance research in the field of religious studies and theology? How can librarians and archivists make their collections accessible in return? This volume showcases the perspectives of faculty, librarians, archivists, and allied cultural heritage professionals who are drawing on primary and secondary sources in innovative ways to create digital humanities projects in the field

Coding to Connect: Centering Joy and Community in Elementary Computer Science Education

In this piece, we weave together personal reflections to explore the design and implementation of an unplugged, elementary computer science (CS) event, and examine the underlying pedagogical principles guiding this work.  Critical CS scholars have increasingly called for centering joy and connection within CS, while simultaneously decentering the neoliberal focus on workforce development.  We aimed to forefront these ideas with a CS event supported and led by a multi-stakeholder partnership between preservice teachers, staff, and faculty within California State University, Dominguez Hills’ College of Education, and the students, inservice teachers, and administration at 186th St. Elementary School.  Historically, CS is an inequitable and inaccessible field that does not prioritize diversity or inclusion.  By bringing together numerous stakeholders from across the community for a CS event centering joy, we hoped to shift perceptions and experiences of CS and find better ways of supporting and inspiring all our students and teachers. &nbsp

Approaches to Broadening Participation with AP Computer Science Principles

The Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) course framework was created with the intention of broadening participation in computing. Research has produced mixed results on whether or not the framework succeeds in that goal. Given that teachers have significant freedom in how they choose to teach the AP CSP content, students can have a variety of experiences that may or may not impact their continued participation in CS. In this paper, I compare four different approaches to the AP CSP framework by examining their impact on AP exam scores, self-efficacy and confidence, belongingness and identity, and persistence and interest, to examine how these approaches might impact those traditionally underrepresented in CS. I also discuss how social and curricular interventions may differ in outcomes

\u3cem\u3eLearning to Code Music\u3c/em\u3e: Development of a Supplemental Unit for High School Computer Science

Learning to Code Music is a supplemental unit developed for high school computer science. This unit was developed after researching the effects of biases in curriculum, effective teaching, and incorporating the arts into coding. This supplemental unit is intended to be used with one of the Computer Science Principles curriculum approved by the College Board and explained in the literature review. It is my goal to have other teachers and myself to use this supplemental unit in their high school computer science courses. All supplemental unit material can be found at https://sites.google.com/notusschools.org/earsketch-csp/hom

Computational Thinking in Mathematics and Computer Science: What Programming Does to Your Head

How you think about a phenomenon certainly influences how you create a program to model it. The main point of this essay is that the influence goes both ways: creating programs influences how you think. The programs we are talking about are not just the ones we write for a computer. Programs can be implemented on a computer or with physical devices or in your mind. The implementation can bring your ideas to life. Often, though, the implementation and the ideas develop in tandem, each acting as a mirror on the other. We describe an example of how programming and mathematics come together to inform and shape our interpretation of a classical result in mathematics: Euclid\u27s algorithm that finds the greatest common divisor of two integers

Creating a Future with Female Coders; Supporting Women Through Community

In the last two decades, the proportion of women earning bachelor’s degrees in computer sciences has declined from 28% to 18% (NSF/NCSES 2015c), even though the proportion of freshmen women declaring a computer sciences major when first enrolled in a 4-year institution has remained stable (at about 20% in recent years)” (NSF, Retention of Women in Computer Science). My undergraduate capstone aims to lessen the amount of women dropping out of computing fields by creating a sense of community. The key components and benefits of community that I targeted were peer support, shared experience, confidence and interest. I approached each of these topics on their own, and created a website to bring together the different parts of the project. I have benefitted greatly from what I have learned over the course of this project, and my hope is that this will be passed on to those who engage in the project

PlayAPC : projeto e desenvolvimento de uma biblioteca gráfica como ferramenta didática para algoritmos e programação de computadores

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Departamento de Ciência da Computação, 2016.Nos cursos de computação, a primeira matéria de programação é fundamental para que o aluno possa progredir na área, porém sua aprendizagem não é trivial. Um dos métodos recorridos para auxiliar o ensino, independente da área, é o uso de recursos gráficos. Desta forma, foi proposta uma biblioteca gráfica denominada PLAYAPC para ser aplicada no primeiro semestre da matéria de computação dos cursos de Engenharia da Computação, Engenharia Mecatrônica, Ciência da Computação e Licenciatura em Computação, na disciplina Algoritmos e Programação de Computadores (APC) da Universidade de Brasília (UnB). A biblioteca utiliza como recurso gráfico a API OpenGL e foi feita na linguagem C++. Apesar disso, essas escolhas de tecnologia em nada interferem no processo de aprendizado da matéria APC que, para alguns professores, é ministrada na linguagem C. Esta monografia descreve o processo desde o levantamento de requisitos para o desenvolvimento da biblioteca até a sua aplicação em aulas de laboratório.In computer’s relative courses, the first programming subject is essencial for the undergraduate student grow up in the area, but his learning is not trivial. One of the methods to assist the teaching, regardless the area, is the use of graphic resources. It was proposed a graphic libray called PLAYAPC to be applied in the first semester at UnB, in Computer’s Engineering course, Mechatronic Engineering course, Bacharel on Computer Science course and Major in Computer course, in the discipline APC. The library uses as graphic resources the API OpenGL and was written in C++ programming language. Even with theses tecnology choises, it will not complicate the learning processing in the discipline, which, for some professors, it is given in C language. This paper describes the survey process requirement from the development of the library to its application in pratical classes