Carmen Garcia from José Martí MAST 6–12 Academy in Hialeah, Florida, is passionate about guiding students from underrepresented groups to computer science.
In July, computer science teacher Carmen Garcia got the results of her students’ AP Computer Science Principles exams: More than 80 percent of them had passed, scoring a 3 or higher. While impressive, she wasn’t too surprised. Last year, her students had a pass rate of 92 percent.
“Considering the circumstances of this year, to have 81 percent pass is a great number,” she says. “Yes, it is down 10 percent from last year but considering the test was 100 percent online, I will take it!”
Like many teachers around the world last year, Carmen had to adapt to new…
Code.org will meet its ambitious goal of making its computer science curriculum available in 30 languages spoken in more than 150 countries.
“I perceive that you are fond of traveling into various countries,” said a pious man to a young Moroccan in the streets of Alexandria sometime in the 14th century. This prophecy moved the young man, Ibn Battuta, to embark on a journey that took him to the equivalent of 44 countries in 30 years.
The spirit of Ibn Battuta — who went on to become one of the greatest travelers in history and rival Marco Polo — continues to live, helping schoolchildren across the Arab world to learn computer science.
The Battuta tutorial would not exist had it not been…
Bring learning to life with virtual field trips, class chats, and other resources.
To help bring computer science to life for students of all ages, Code.org is proud to announce CS Journeys, a program designed for students to explore how computer science impacts their world and envision their own future possibilities.
The most impactful learning often happens beyond the classroom lesson, perhaps during a memorable field trip or from a visiting speaker. Connecting what students are learning in the classroom to the real world not only enables them to better understand and recall concepts, but also excites and inspires them to continue learning.
The CS Journeys program is designed around three primary objectives:
- excite and inspire students to learn CS,
- encourage students to…
This issue is bipartisan: The Obama and Trump administrations both supported computer science. We call on the Biden administration to ask Congress to fully fund CS.
As schools reopen this fall, we call on the U.S. federal government to fund computer science courses in K-12. Computer science is foundational, not only for students who want careers in tech, but for citizenship in a digital world.
Why computer science?
Research shows that CS helps students succeed in other academic studies and leads to increased college enrollment. CS opens doors of opportunity to middle-class jobs — there are 569,000 currently open jobs in computing occupations across every industry. But access to CS is woefully inequitable. …
Today, I had the opportunity to attend a White House summit on cybersecurity to talk with leaders across the nation about the role of cybersecurity in keeping us safe.
With the ever-expanding role of digital technology in our lives, cybersecurity is of utmost importance to personal safety, and even national security. In the U.S., people are more concerned about getting hacked than any other crime. Beyond personal risk, hackers are trying to access computers at every company and government — to steal money, demand ransoms, or even to shut down critical infrastructure like electricity, water, or food supplies.
So far in 2021, states across the U.S. have made great strides in implementing computer science education policy.
The state of our schools, communities, and the world has changed drastically in the past year. Policymakers are increasingly engaged on issues that impact our jobs, security, and way of life, both now and in the future. That’s certainly true for progress being made in computer science education policy across the nation in 2021.
So far this year, states have demonstrated a renewed focus on a set of nine policies to make computer science foundational in K-12 education systems.
Start teaching Code.org’s middle school CS curriculum with this new, self-paced Professional Learning option.
Teachers are at the heart of our work at Code.org, and we are committed to expanding our Professional Learning offerings to support teachers in every stage of their computer science teaching journey, no matter where they are.
To help fill a growing need and allow even more teachers to begin teaching computer science, we’ve created the first-ever self-paced Professional Learning course to prepare educators who want to start teaching our CS Discoveries curriculum.
Interested teachers can learn more and start the course today here.
CS Discoveries is our computer science curriculum designed for 6–10th grade students. It is mapped to…
The two high school students in Jersey City, New Jersey, lead online classes and use the proceeds to benefit their community.
When the COVID-19 pandemic caused school closures around the world, many students suddenly found themselves with a lot of time on their hands. But sisters Harita and Sharada Suresh of Jersey City, New Jersey, saw an opportunity.
“We were bored at home and realized other kids were bored too,” says Harita, 14. “Extracurricular activities were canceled, too, so a lot of us were just playing games. So we wanted to let kids learn how to actually create the same games that they’re already playing.”
That’s when Harita and her younger sister Sharada, 13, started Little Apple Academy, a nonprofit organization…
A culture of computer science and robotics in a Houston-area school district consistently produces students who win local, state and national competitions.
In the heat of the moment, the phone seemed to have gotten lost in the shuffle.
The rookie robotics team of five students from Carver High School had just minutes until the start of the final competition of the day at the University Interscholastic League Robotics First Division State Championship in San Antonio, Texas. Now they had a problem: the smartphone they used to control their robot had somehow gone missing.
No remote meant no way to control their bot.
“It was kind of a scurry to get everything together and talk with the referee before the start of the…
How do two entrepreneurs sell their first startup at ages 17 and 18? All it takes is a vision… and a bit of an early start.
Seattle-based tech news outlet Geekwire first reported the story in May that Seattle teens Sage Khanuja, 17, and Nikolas Ioannou, 18, sold their telemedicine startup, Spira, to a New York-based healthcare company.
Best of all, both say they got their start learning computer science on Code.org and other online resources.
Spira was initially developed to track respiratory health using a phone’s microphone to conduct a cough and auscultation test, and soon became a multi-faceted…
