Month: February 2010
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Clarence Ellis’ “First” for African Americans in Computer Science
One of the kids on our street, Khalif, surprised me when, in response to the 2008 Presidential election, he said, “I hate Barack Obama.” “What???” came my kneejerk reaction. Just a few weeks ago, I knew Khalif was rooting for Obama FTW! “Because,” Khalif explained, “my teachers were always saying I could grow up to…
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Boolean Algebra and the I Ching (Yijing)
Eight Trigrams of the Yijing In Sadie Plant’s book zeros + ones, she explores the duality of binary digits as fitting in with the human habit of dichotomizing concepts: The zeros and ones of machine code seem to offer themselves as a perfect symbols of the orders of Western reality, the ancient logical codes which…
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Required Reading for Public Computer Science Teachers: Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas
Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms Dr. Seymour Papert is best known as the inventor of the Logo programming language, a tool for teaching children problem solving, but his influence in education goes much further than that. Papert has always been a visionary where computers and education intersect, and it is incredible how glacially society has moved to…
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b00le0… bOOleO… Booleo… a Game of Boolean Logic Gates with an Ambiguous Spelling
My Opponent Vicky I’ve got a folder of great ideas I will never get to, and one meme I’ve had in there for a long time, but never knew how to implement, was a card game involving programming logic, where two players construct applications out of conditional logic to defeat each other. Then I recently…
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Star Trek Online: The Bait Ball Strategy
Bait Ball Credit: Lara Sobel In the extraordinary documentary Blue Planet there were several examples of a school of fish forming a bait ball to defend against predators, where a school of fish swirls into itself, becoming a tightly-knit unit; however, what we see in the documentary is this school of fish becoming easy prey…
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Delta Iota Phi Computer Literacy Program: An Experiment in Bringing Lower Income African American Students into Computer Science
The Bit Computer Literacy through Incentivized Learning Communities in Northeastern Carolina still reflect the ethnic divisions created before the Civil Rights era. The schools, while no longer segregated by official policy, were never integrated, meaning there is a “Black School” and a “White School” as my conversations with locals have revealed, and attempts to force…