So glad so many teachers at @The_School are participating in @CSEdWeek’s #HourOfCode!

Today’s GoogleDoodle commemorates Grace Hopper’s 107th birthday, and this whole week (December 9-15, 2013) is designated as Computer Science Education Week. In order to get people, especially kids, interested in coding, Code.org and @CSEdWeek are imploring folks around the world to participate in an Hour of Code.

I received the following by email today:

Today, over 5 million students — in 25,000 classrooms, across 160 countries — will be first to experience the Hour of Code, to learn one hour of computer science through Code.org’s new learning platform, with video tutorials by Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Bosh and Bill Gates, or through other activities.

Try an Hour of Code now at http://hourofcode.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5FbmsH4fw

Code.org and all the partners behind Computer Science Education Week encourage students, parents, and educators worldwide to engage in computer science. This isn’t just about one hour. See new free curriculum or how to partner with Code.org to bring CS to your whole district at http://code.org/educate

Please join us in supporting this unprecedented event to make history for computer science. If you’re doing your own Hour of Code, share it with the world using #HourofCode.

There are great tutorials and activities on the Hour of Code site, so as a prequel to this week, Dylan Ryder and I organized a buddy activity on Friday afternoon to get older kids and younger kids to run through a command code scenario using scenes from Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies.(You can jump around the 20 different levels on the site here: http://learn.code.org/hoc/1) Many thanks to Kathryn Kaiser, Primary Division Principal, for helping us to coordinate with teachers and students from six different grades!

6th graders paired with 2nd graders, 5th graders paired with 1st Graders, and 4th graders paired with Kindergarteners. @DylanMRyder captured and tweeted a terrific image which was further retweeted by Code.org!

Girls love to program! #HourofCode kicks off @CSEdWeek early @The_School. 4th grdrs teach K buddies to code. #edtech pic.twitter.com/ebyEk7KvRC

— Dylan Ryder (@DylanMRyder) December 6, 2013

Later this week, middle school math teachers (Katie Reimer, Sabrina Goldberg, and Katie Hildebrandt) will be offering 6th, 7th, and 8th graders choice activities on Wednesday to further participate in the Hour of Code.

In Katie Reimer’s 8th math class, analyzing stocks with Google spreadsheets and formulas:

 

http://google.com/finance
Katie Reimer, 8th grade Algebra teacher at The School at Columbia University, stopped by yesterday to talk about her upcoming mini-unit on stock prices and percent changes. She wanted students to figure out relationships between today’s price, yesterday’s closing price, and price from one year ago today. She asked about ways to assess this, and we decided to use information located via Google Finance and a Google Spreadsheet with formulas to calculate change on day and change over a year. Students chose 10 stocks based on products they use everyday and analyzed their changes. Tomorrow, kids will take the roles of front office and back office to assess each other’s research.

Katie left finance in 2008, and it’s been a pleasure to join her class and learn math with someone who has used it in the real world. I’m pretty sure these 8th grader’s are more financially savvy then me at this point…