GUTS Alum on Winning Supercomputer Challenge Team Photo (from left): Kathy Keith, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Community Partnerships Office and Supercomputing Challenge winners Theo Goujon, Lisel Faust, Ramona Park, Rowan Cahill (GUTS alumni), and their teachers Hope Cahill (former GUTS club leader) and Brian Smith, and Shaun Cooper, the awards ceremony MC.
How to Color a Lizard In an article from phys.org, researchers have used simulation to show that skin color in animals arise from microscopic interactions between neighboring cells.
Learning to Think Like a Computer This New York Times Education Life article by Laura Pappano gives a well-rounded view of the integration of Computational Thinking in K-12. Pappano does a great job of making the link between CT terms, how we know them in everyday life, and why they are important in computing. See if you agree....
Computational Thinking in Teacher Education Project GUTS was highlighted in a new article on Computational Thinking in Teacher Education. The authors, Aman Yadav, Chris Stephenson, and Hai Hong, state "One example of embedding computational thinking in science classrooms is Project GUTS (Growing Up Thinking Scientifically), which highlights what computational thinking looks like for students using three domains: modeling and simulation, robotics, and game design.
Computer Modeling of Namibia's Mysterious Fairy Circles Two graduate students developed a computer model of how fairy circles form. In their model, the interaction of termites and vegetation caused the development of fairy circles and another smaller scale pattern between fairy circles that no one before had see. The two students went to the desert of Namibia to look for this secondary pattern and found it. While not "proof" of how the Namibian fairy circles were formed, the finding furthers our understanding of pattern development in nature in
Don't You Dare Try to Teach Science Without Building Models In this January article in Wired by Rhett Allain, the author states that science is about building models and thus science classes should be framed around building models. Do you agree? https://www.wired.com/2017/01/dont-dare-try-teach-science-without-building-models/
NSTA Stance on Computing Education NSTA Executive Director, David Evans, while an advocate for CS education does not believe computer science should be able to count as a science graduation credit. In the NSTA community blog (http://nstacommunities.org/blog/2016/10/17/computer-science-should-supplement-not-supplant-science-education/) of October 17th he stated his view that "Computer Science Should Supplement, not Supplant Science Education."