My CS Enrollment is down — which is crazy as it is one of the few professions not only hiring students out of college, but their starting salary is up! Of course, the low enrollment helps.
Anyway, I'm teaching three sections of math/science study skills. They are all doubly described, and I suspect if I look up my students on My Data portal they haven't been successful on the TAKS tests in the past.
My job – to change that.
One of my first missions, is to make these students comfortable with computers. One thing the research shows on this type of students is that they are on the wrong side of the digital divide, so the first thing we're going to go to is to become "computer literate". Word, Excel and Powerpoint are my goals. I'm going to use the Baycom tutorials at http://www.baycongroup.com/index.htm, they work with my other students.
Next I'm going to teach them Alice.
I want to use Alice to illustrate their math problems, and have the computer do the math. I've found once a kid writes a computer program to do something, they don't forget how to do that something again.
I'll let everyone know how it goes.
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