TITLE: Off to Visit Google
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 28, 2008  1:14 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I'm preparing for a quick visit to the Google campus
tomorrow and Friday.  This is my first trip to the
Google campus, and I have to admit that I'm looking
forward to it.  To this wide-eyed Midwestern computer
scientist, it feels as if I am visiting Camelot.

The occasion of my trip is a "roadshow summit"
co-sponsored by the
<A HREF="http://www.csta.acm.org/">
   Computer Science Teachers Association</A>
and
<A HREF="http://www.sigcse.org/">
   SIGCSE</A>,
and hosted by Google.  The CSTA is a unit of the ACM
"that supports and promotes the teaching of computer
science and other computing disciplines" in K-12
schools.  The goal of the workshop is:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
... to bring together faculty and students who are
currently offering, or planning to develop, outreach
"road shows" to local K-12 schools.  Our goal is to
improve the quality and number of college and
university-supported careers and equity outreach programs
by helping to develop a community that will share research,
expertise, and best practices, and create shared resources.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

My selfish goal in wanting to attend the workshop initially
was to steal lots of good ideas with more experience and
creativity than I.  My contribution will be to share what
we have done in our department, especially over the last
semester.  I asked two faculty members to develop curricula
for K-12 outreach activities, in lieu of one of their usual
course assignments.  The curriculum materials should be useful
whether we take them on the road to the schools or when we
have students on campus for visits.  One professor started
with robotics in mind but quickly switched
to some simple
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~schafer/outreach/">
   programming activities</A>
with the
<A HREF="http://scratch.mit.edu/">
   Scratch programming environment</A>.
The other worked on high-performance and parallel computing
for pre-college students, an education thread he has been
working in for much of this decade.  I do not have a link
to materials he developed specifically for our outreach
efforts yet, but I can point you to
<A HREF="http://littlefe.net/">
   LittleFe</A>,
one of his ongoing projects</A>.

I'm curious to see what other schools have done and still
plan to steal as many ideas as I can!  And, while I'm looking
forward to the workshop and seeing Google's campus, I am
not looking forward to the fast turnaround...  My flight
leaves tomorrow morning; we work Thursday afternoon, Thursday
evening, Friday morning, and Friday early afternoon; and
then I start the sojourn back home.  I'll cover a lot of
miles in forty-eight hours, but I hope they prove fruitful.
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