Uncategorized

CodeDay is a great opportunity for high school students to apply their programming skills and learn to make games & apps with fellow students in the Seattle area.  PSCSTA officer, Hélène Martin will be speaking and this event is organized by two Garfield HS Students!  Here’s the Details: Come to CodeDay Seattle this Presidents Day weekend! Pitch ideas, form teams, and build amazing apps and games as quickly as possible! CodeDay Seattle is a 24 hour hackathon for students. It’s…

We had over 200 students in 74 teams representing 26 schools join us today for a programming competition hosted in conjunction with UW CSE’s DawgBytes program!  The event was generously sponsored by Microsoft TEALS. Dozens of teachers and industry volunteers made this possible by hauling furniture, herding students, creating huge stacks of empty pizza boxes, judging problems, hunting for speaker cables and more!  All of your contributions were invaluable to making this event a success.  Thank you. Congratulations to all of…

Here is a link to an article in the New York Times about Microsoft’s activities in the Seattle area, promoting Computer Science education in the high schools.  Kevin Wang is in the news again.

Dear chapter members, At our August meeting, we developed a plan for this year’s chapter meetings. It promises to be another great year of CS education discussions. As usual, the meetings will be on Saturdays, hosted by the UW CSE Department in the lovely 6th Floor Commons room of the Paul Allen Center.  However we have changed the start of our meetings to 10am so they do not take up the middle of your Saturday.  The new meeting time is…

The Computer Science & Information Technology (CS&IT) Conference is the only international conference specifically developed for K-12 computer science educators. This year the conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Irvine on July 9th and 10th, 2012, in Irvine, CA. To see the agenda, register for the conference, or reserve your reduced housing rate at the Hyatt, visit www.cstaconference.org.

Two of our chapter members recently received a nice recognition. Hélène Martin and Lauren Bricker were fêted by the UW CSE department, having been nominated by current undergrads in that program as secondary teachers who inspired them in high school or community college classes. Read more about the award and the event here: UW CSE “Inspirational Teacher” dinner. Congratulations, Hélène and Lauren!

Registration is now closed for this Saturday’s PS CSTA Spring Programming Contest, sponsored by Amazon.com. 26 teams from 12 Puget Sound area high schools will be participating. Read about the lineup here: http://goo.gl/0CtvL.

Interesting piece from the NY Times about the research of Danah Boyd on teenage online behavior: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/fashion/danah-boyd-cracking-teenagers-online-codes.html (curiously cataloged in the “Fashion” section because it appeared in the NYT “Sunday Styles” section of the print edition)

I read something recently about a fairly new course management software platform called Coursekit. Today I see that they have received some VC funding: http://goo.gl/GE6Ed. Its avowed simplicity was appealing, and I have been meaning to check it out. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with it?