[Edu-sig] ACM Urges Obama to Include CS as Core Component of Science, Math Education

[kirby urner]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/12/23 michel paul <mpaul213 at gmail.com>:
>> http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/obama-education
>>
>> "Computing education benefits all students, not just those interested in
>> pursuing computer science or information technology careers," said Bobby
>> Schnabel, chair of ACM's Education Policy Committee (EPC).
>
> Thanks. I'll invite them to join Earth Treasury's digital textbook
> project for the OLPC XO + Sugar. We have Smalltalk, Python, and FORTH
> standard on the XO, and we can add anything else of interest. Well,
> not Ada or C++, but those aren't of interest to third graders. APL is
> coming. Scheme is pretty easy. What else would you like?
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks
>

Butting in, I'd like Erlang please.

I just read this and it seemed to make a lot of sense to me, got me
curious about Erlang again:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-December/084265.html

I like the idea of taking students through a language a day for five
days, making it completely a play experience, no sense that the
ax will fall if you feel floundery some of the time.  However, for brevity,
we'd want all of these languages to be interactive, like APL.

Possible sequence:  Python (because easy); Scheme; Erlang,
Ruby, REBOL.

Hey, this is fun, this is empowering, this is middle school, thanks to
philanthropic campaigns by ACM, OLPC etc.  NCTM seemed luke
warm most the time, but that's cuz our best cheerleaders haven't
had access to their conferences (yet).  We need to stage an
Obamarama for those left behind folks.

NCTM = National Council of Teachers of Mathematics for those
not up on everything.  Big focus has been "technology in the
classroom" but that mainly just means TI calculators, maybe
some page-turner "electronic textbooks", not much mention
of programming languages that I've seen (except the TI one).

NCTM partnered with TI and CBS on this police show called
"NUMB3RS" which I have some problems with:

http://focus.ti.com/pr/docs/preldetail.tsp?sectionId=594&prelId=et050009

Snapshots of me being critical of NUMB3RS in my blog:

http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/search?q=NUMB3RS

Kirby

>> Yes we can!  Yes we can!  Yes we can!
>>
>> - Michel
>
>
> --
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> The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai
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