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.
Project GUTS presentation at NSTA conference John Sweeney, an 8th grade teacher at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School in Cordova, Tennessee, wrote to tell us he will be giving a presentation on Project GUTS at the NSTA national conference in Los Angeles next week!
Project GUTS Marketplace is Now Open We have opened a new Marketplace where teachers, school districts, and other Project GUTS PD providers can purchase our printed CS in Science curriculum binders and StarLogo Nova block cards on demand. We are using Mimeo as the provider as we have found their print on demand service to be exemplary. Mimeo can work with districts and schools to set up invoicing via PO or can accept payment directly using a credit card.
The Long Road to Making CS Count in New Mexico The New Mexico chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association has been hard at work proposing legislation that would make CS count towards high school graduation as a math or science credit. Spearheaded by CSTA-NM President Paige Prescott, the bill was two years in the making and had the support of industry, universities and the Public Education Department. Sponsored by Representative
Teaching Kids to Debug Code Independently Friend of GUTS, Sheena Vaidyanathan, writes about her experiences teaching students to debug code. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-01-16-teaching-kids-to-debug-code-independently
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."