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Dec
9
From Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac:
December 9th is the birthday of one of the people who helped invent the modern computer: Grace Hopper, born in New York City (1906). She began tinkering around with machines when she was seven years old, dismantling several alarm clocks around the house to see how they worked.
She studied math and physics in college, and eventually earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale. When World War II broke out, and Hopper wanted to serve her country. Her father had been an admiral in the Navy, so she applied to a division of the Navy called WAVES, which stood for Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service. She was assigned to work on a machine that might help calculate the trajectory of bombs and rockets.
She learned how to program that early computing machine, and wrote the first instruction manual for its use. She went on to work on several more versions of the same machine. In 1952, Hopper noticed that most computer errors were the result of humans making mistakes in writing programs. So she attempted to solve that problem by writing a new computer language that used ordinary words instead of just numbers. It was one of the first computer languages, and the first designed to help ordinary people write computer programs, and she went on to help develop it into the computer language known as COBOL, or “Common Business-Oriented Language.”
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Dec
8
The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. Anyone, anywhere can organize an Hour of Code event. One-hour tutorials are available in over 30 languages. No experience needed. Ages 4 to 104.
77,423 Hour of Code events around the world.
Take a look at these links:
Hour of Code: http://hourofcode.com/us
Teach the Hour of Code: https://code.org/educate/hoc
Tutorials for Beginners from Computer Science Education Week: http://csedweek.org/learn
More posts on Computer Science in Education Week and Hour of Code
Dec
6
This weekend’s quote is a poem by Longfellow, especially pertinent during the last days of this turbulent semester:
The heights by great (folks) reached and kept
Were not obtained by sudden flight;
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
Standing on what too long we bore,…
With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,
We may discern-unseen before-
A path to higher destinies!
~Longfellow, Updated
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