Information Technology Education

For several months, I always carried a deck of cards in my backpack. I like playing gin rummy as much as anyone, but that's not the reason why. I carried them because I had discovered Computer Science Outreach Magic . I learned a Computer Science magic trick from cs4fn.org/magic , and I've been hooked ever since. I've performed this trick to much success when manning booths at outreach events and teacher visiting days. It lets you engage people while illustrating a bit of computer science. At the PyLadies ' lunch at PyCon '13 , Esther Nam convinced me to write a blog post about this card trick I was so excited about. "Lots of people want to know how to demonstrate computer science without a computer!" she said. Teaching the card trick to Computer Science student volunteers at the Tucson Festival of Books. Performing the big reveal at a University of Arizona College of Science ceremony.  That's exactly why I love this trick. It's portable, it'...

(...or at least how I did) I wanted to write this blog post because: I'm proud of the brochure I made for my CS department when I was a member of the CS Ambassadors club, one year ago. I realized that my CS department wasn't all that great at describing what it was about—and I imagine it isn't just my university that has this problem. I believe that if a department can't describe Computer Science in an intriguing way at university and outreach events, they're throwing away a valuable method of drawing in new students. Mainly those who already know about Computer Science before college will enroll, which bodes badly for diversity in your department. Here is the original flyer (click to enlarge if you like). To be fair, it's more an "intro to the major" brochure than an outreach brochure, which could explain the wordiness. But that can't explain the picture of a guy looking into what I assume is a chemistry machine? Or the idea that one of the best j...

I'm attending/volunteering at PyData , and it's been great. Tutorials on pandas , Matplotlib , and NumPy were very useful, and meeting real-world data scientists is fantastic. Volunteering is a great excuse for saying hello to people (like Google director of research Peter Norvig !), as is helping attendees with their Matplotlib questions. I was moved to blog by a panel featuring heavy contributors to major open source Python packages, including SciPy , pandas , IPython , scikit-learn , and CherryPy . This discussion and my observations of the PyCon sprints have changed my mindset: contributing to open source software has become much less intimidating! I want everyone to have this feeling, but particularly female students, because we are especially underrepresented in the OSS (open source software) world. Even small contributions to projects could be a way to impress employers, and could help change the ratio in CS overall. The moderator asked the panelists about non-typica...

     My department head convinced me and another senior in the Computer Science department to be "career panelists" at a local one-day conference meant to introduce science careers to middle school girls.      Sometimes CS gets left out of the "STEM" conversation, and this event was a good example: my classmate and I were the only advocates for computing, and there were no technology workshops at all, despite hands-on virtual reality and robotics events being advertised. There were fantastic astronomy, biology, and chemistry workshops however.      I mentioned this to the organizer, and she reminded me that it was a completely volunteer-run event, and no one volunteered to offer technology workshops . I wondered how much responsibility the organizers had for reaching out to people in technology, or in that case reaching out to minority speakers (all presenters I saw were Caucasian, while the students were 90% Latina), but tha...

I'm participating in Computer Science Education Week! It's a movement to get people involved in promoting CS education at a grass-roots level. Although it's set for the week of Grace Hopper's birthday (Dec 9-15), you can participate at any time that's good for you. This is great for me, because that is my finals and graduation week! Get more info and pledge your support at  http://www.csedweek.org/ . I plan to blog about my views on CS education as a university student who has been involved in several outreach projects. My main goal is to create a list of resources for teachers to incorporate CS into their classrooms, which can be distributed at teacher fairs and other outreach events. Let me know if you have ideas!

From Newt's YouTube page: Dinosaurs! What!  Googling reveals that liberal websites have documented  some of Former Speaker Gingrich's mentions of dinosaurs. I think the best of all is this tweet from about a year ago.  Source The attempt to show humility by putting a T-Rex skull in one's office is just so Newt.

I just returned from a semester studying at the National University of Singapore. It's a vibrant place, with tonnes of activities, motivated students, and funky British spelling. Perhaps the things I'll remember the most are my frustration at the multilevel, bus-linked, maze-like campus and my amazement at the subsidized textbooks and food. I had had high hopes for my classes, because of the global stature of the university and its breadth in research. A school that has a sizable computational biology department and a world-class Centre for Quantum Technologies must do a pretty good job training its undergrads, I thought. As it turned out, my lecturers left a whole lot to be desired, and my best experiences on campus were extracurricular cultural activities I signed up for — archery lessons, exploration of buddhist texts with a former monk, an inter-faculty ping-pong tournament, being in a short video shoot with a pair of amateur filmmakers, and meeting und...