[Yr11 Information Technology] Fwd: NCSS Challenge 2013 begins August 5th

[Graham, Margaret M]

Hi
I had issues with the enrolment as well but only when I was using IE - worked in Chrome.
I contacted them and they were really quick with their response and support.

Margaret Graham 

Telephone: (03) 8804 6464
Website: www.blackburnhs.vic.edu.au
Address: 60 Springfield Road, 
Blackburn, Victoria. 3130
Australia


-----Original Message-----
From: yr11it-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:yr11it-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of margaret.lawson at konstantkaos.net
Sent: Monday, 22 July 2013 2:48 PM
To: Year 11 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Yr11 Information Technology] Fwd: NCSS Challenge 2013 begins August 5th

I am trying to enroll my class (10), but the Grok Learning web site is making it hard for me!

Margaret

> We have a few.
>
> Esther Andrews | Admin Systems Developer, IT and Maths Teacher Bendigo 
> Senior Secondary College
> Box 545 | BENDIGO | Victoria  3552   Australia
> B +61 3 5443 1222 | F  +61 3 5441 4548 
> andrews.esther at bssc.edu.au<mailto:andrews.esther at bssc.edu.au>
> www.bssc.edu.au<http://www.bssc.edu.au/>
> Our ROLE is to empower learners for individual, community and global 
> leadership. We value Respect, Optimism, Learning and Environment.
> ________________________________
> From: yr11it-bounces at edulists.com.au [yr11it-bounces at edulists.com.au] 
> on behalf of Roland Gesthuizen [rgesthuizen at gmail.com]
> Sent: Sunday, 21 July 2013 10:42 PM
> To: Year 12 IT Applications Teachers' Mailing List; eLearning mailing 
> list; Edulist IT11 List
> Cc: Nicky Ringland
> Subject: [Yr11 Information Technology] Fwd: NCSS Challenge 2013 begins 
> August 5th
>
> Looks like we will have around 30+ students enrolled from our college 
> in this challenge. Who else from Victoria is joining us? There is 
> still time to rally interest and register before it kicks off next week.
>
> Details below ..
>
> Regards Roland
>
> Roland Gesthuizen | eLearning Leader
> Keysborough College DEECD
> http://about.me/rgesthuizen
>
> "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can 
> change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." 
> --Margaret Mead
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Roland Gesthuizen
> <rgesthuizen at gmail.com<mailto:rgesthuizen at gmail.com>>
> Subject: Fwd: NCSS Challenge 2013 begins August 5th
> Date: 11 July 2013 12:06:50 AM AEST
> To: Year 12 IT Applications Teachers' Mailing List 
> <itapps at edulists.com.au<mailto:itapps at edulists.com.au>>, Edulist IT11 
> List <yr11it at edulists.com.au<mailto:yr11it at edulists.com.au>>, Edulist 
> eLearning List 
> <elearning at edulists.com.au<mailto:elearning at edulists.com.au>>
>
> G'day fellow Vic IT teachers,
>
> The NCSS challenge is really with joining. Details are below. Register 
> ASAP with your students.
>
> We had a great time doing this last year for year 11 and 9, involving 
> all the students into our IT classes. Repeating it again for 2013. The 
> organisers offer oodles of online and realtime help and teachers can 
> even get to learn some programming along the way, especially with the 
> new Python 3 programming language.
>
> It was so cool for a change to hand out some IT certificates at a 
> school assembly. I was really pleased that some of the girls went on 
> to do year
> 12 IT :-)
>
> Go for IT
>
> Regards Roland @rgesthuizen
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Nicky Ringland 
> <challenge at ncss.edu.au<mailto:challenge at ncss.edu.au>>
> Date: 10 July 2013 5:40:54 PM AEST
> To: undisclosed-recipients:;
> Subject: NCSS Challenge 2013 begins August 5th
>
> Hi CS4HS teachers!
>
> The National Computer Science School Challenge 
> 2013<https://groklearning.com/challenge/teachers?utm_source=csteachers
> &utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=challenge-2013>,
> run by the University of Sydney, starts on August 5th for 5 weeks 
> until 9th September.  In the Challenge, students (and teachers) learn 
> how to program while they compete.  Last year we had over 4200 high 
> school students (and some primary students) and 330 teachers from 420 
> schools compete in the Challenge.  This year we're hoping to more than 
> double that number, and we need your help to reach 10,000 students this year!
>
> Many of you have enrolled your classes, and sometimes even whole 
> school years, in the NCSS Challenge.  We would really appreciate it if 
> you could encourage your colleagues to take a look at participating in 
> the Challenge this year. The first part of the Beginners'
> stream<https://groklearning.com/learn/challenge-beginners-2013/w1p1/0/
> > is now available for free, so teachers and students have a easy way 
> to experiment with the content and judge if it's right for them.
>
> Watch out for the NCSS Challenge poster and letter to teachers, sent 
> to the "head computing teacher" in every high school in Australia in 
> the last few days.  Just in case you miss that, I've included more details below.
> Also, we've made some changes for 2013, so if you've done the 
> Challenge before, you may still want to read the New in 2013 section 
> below (especially the change from Python 2 to Python 3).
>
> We look forward to seeing you and your students in the Challenge!
>
> What is the NCSS Challenge?
>
> The NCSS
> Challenge<https://groklearning.com/challenge/teachers?utm_source=cstea
> chers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=challenge-2013>
> is an online programming competition for (high) school students and 
> teachers. Unlike most other competitions, we don't assume the students 
> already know how to program, instead students develop their Python 
> programming skills over the 5 weeks of the Challenge.  Each week, we 
> release learning resources suitable for either in-class or 
> self-directed learning, covering many aspects of programming 
> including: variables and data types; if statements; while and for 
> loops; algorithms; file I/O; functions; code reading and debugging; 
> and code style and comments.  The number and pace of the concepts 
> covered varies between the three streams of the Challenge: beginners, 
> intermediate, and advanced.  Enrolment in a stream costs $20 per 
> student (including GST). This can be paid by students individually via 
> PayPal, or your school can be invoiced for them as a group. Students 
> generally spend a few hours a week to complete all questions, although 
> this varies depending on which stream they are enrolled in.
>
> A set of 5-10 interesting and fun problems (the 'challenges') are 
> released at the same time which test the new material for that week 
> and consolidate understanding of the previous weeks' material.  The 
> difficulty of the problems varies between the three streams of the 
> Challenge.  Each week's problems also range in difficulty: starting 
> with problems testing the previous week's material, then introducing 
> the new concepts in simpler questions, and finally combining the 
> concepts together.  A student who cannot complete the final question 
> for week X, will still be able to solve some of the simpler problems 
> for week X+1 (so they shouldn't feel disheartened if they can't solve 
> the last problem from each week, there will definitely be things they can solve the following week).
>
> Participants submit their solutions to our web-based intelligent 
> auto-marking system which checks the correctness of their program 
> against a battery of test cases. These test cases are designed to lead 
> the student through solving the problem where possible, and encourage 
> them to think about thorough testing. Points are awarded for solving 
> each problem and there is a small penalty for making a large number of 
> submissions to discourage resubmitting without thinking!
>
> Submissions close for a particular week's questions on Sunday evening.  
> At 9am on Monday, the solutions, hints and commentary to those 
> problems are released, along with the notes and problems for the following week.
> Students are still able to submit answers to problems and have them 
> auto-marked after the solutions are released, but they no longer 
> receive any points for getting them correct.
>
> For more information about the Challenge, see our 
> website<https://groklearning.com/challenge/teachers?utm_source=csteachers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=challenge-2013>.
>
> NCSS Challenge streams
>
> There are three NCSS
> Challenge<https://groklearning.com/challenge/teachers?utm_source=cstea
> chers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=challenge-2013>
> streams: beginners, intermediate and advanced.
>
> Beginners is an introductory course suitable with no prior programming 
> experience. This stream is most suited to students in junior secondary 
> or late primary school (11 - 16 year olds) or anyone who wants to 
> start with the basics.  It covers variables, user input, strings, 
> integers, floats, lists (arrays), if statements, and for/while loops. 
> Beginners has 10 problems per week - but the problems are quite 
> similar to each other conceptually (they look different, but emphasise 
> the same underlying concepts).  So it is a bit more like programming drill - but fun!
>
> Intermediate is designed for students who either have completed the 
> Beginners stream in a previous year, or have some other prior 
> programming experience (in Python or another programming language). 
> This stream is targeted at students in middle secondary school and 
> above (14 - 18 year olds), but advanced junior students will also 
> enjoy it!  It covers dictionaries, files I/O and writing functions in 
> addition to the concepts in the beginners stream.
>
> Advanced is designed for students who have either excelled at the 
> Intermediate stream in a previous year, or are already experienced 
> programmers.  This stream is aimed at students in senior secondary 
> school
> (16 - 18 years) or extremely talented junior students.  Advanced 
> contains very tough problems for experienced Python (or other) 
> programmers, and introduces additional material on regular 
> expressions, recursion, parsing and object-oriented programming.
>
> Which Python stream is appropriate for your class?
>
> My recommendation is that if you've got Year 5-8's doing the 
> Challenge, go for beginners.  If you've got a weaker class of Year 
> 9-10 students with no exposure to programming, beginners might be 
> appropriate.  If you've got a class of stronger students, or those 
> with some experience in something like Scratch, or similar programming 
> environments, you might prefer the additional content of intermediate.  
> It also depends on how much time you have to spend on going through 
> the notes with the students before they attack the problems.  Other 
> schools discuss the problems at an algorithmic level (not the actual 
> code required) and then the students program them up.  This extra 
> support can make intermediate more accessible.  Finally, advanced is 
> really designed for students who have conquered everything in intermediate without breaking a sweat!
>
> If you have a class with a great range in ability and interest, you 
> might like to choose a mixed strategy - putting some students in 
> beginners and others intermediate.  Some students sign themselves up 
> for multiple levels at once.  Another option is to start your class on 
> beginners, and if they are handling things easily, we can move some of 
> them to intermediate sometime during the second week (so they still 
> have time to get all of the points for week 2).  If you'd like to do 
> that, please email challenge at ncss.edu.au<mailto:challenge at ncss.edu.au> 
> or contact us through the messaging system and we'll make the adjustments.
>
> To give you some idea of completion rates: last year, 100% of students 
> attacked the first couple of questions in intermediate, but only 65% 
> solved the last problem in week 1. Then 87% of students solved the 
> first problem in week 2, dropping back down to about 66% for the last 
> question in week 2.  In the end, over 50% of the students completed 
> some of the intermediate questions right through to Week 5.
>
> When does the NCSS Challenge run?
>
> The Challenge starts Monday 5th August and will run for 5 weeks. 
> Questions and resources will be released at 9am on Monday morning and 
> the solutions need to be submitted by 8:59pm on the following Sunday 
> for beginner's and intermediate, and 11:59pm Sunday for advanced.  The 
> first week is our 'friendly week' and so there are no points for 
> solving the problems. This gives participants a chance to install and 
> run Python on their own machines, and get used to our online testing 
> system, and judge which stream they should compete in. It also means 
> it is possible to sign up at any time next week without being 
> disadvantaged at all (or even part way into week 2 of the Challenge).
>
> How do I enrol my class and how much is it?
>
> As well as individual enrolments from students and teachers, we have a 
> bulk enrolment option for schools which allows a teacher to either 
> manually enter a whole class or upload a CSV file of names and email 
> addresses.  This can then be paid in one go either via PayPal or 
> through an invoice to the school.
>
> The cost is $20 per participant (student or teacher) per stream 
> including GST.  There is a $30 yearly subscription available that 
> gives students or teachers access to all three Challenge streams, and 
> all other courses and competitions created by Grok Learning (see 
> below).  We know that it can take some time for schools to collect 
> money and send us a cheque, so we are happy for participants to start 
> the competition before the money arrives. We will not send out 
> certificates of participation and commendation unless the payment has been received.
>
> Interaction on the site
>
> Students get instant feedback on the correctness of their submissions, 
> and the test cases give them hints as to what they got wrong.  Top 
> performing students appear on separate leader boards for each stream - 
> split into junior (Year 5-8), intermediate (Year 9-10) and senior 
> divisions (Year 11-12), and this is updated as soon as students submit correct solutions.
>
> We have online forums for general topics and also for each problem, 
> and the participants have been very helpful (whilst maintaining some 
> spirit of
> competition) when others have been stuck on a problem.  There is a 
> real community that forms during the competition, and it is great to 
> see students connect with others who are also passionate about 
> programming. We also have a large number of tutors who monitor 
> participants' progress and send encouragement and hints via a 
> messaging system within the site.  Help is almost always moments away 
> - in fact, often we will have answered a question before a teacher 
> would have had time to move across the classroom and answer it in person!
>
> Teachers in the Challenge
>
> Some teachers enrol in the Challenge for their own professional 
> development or just the fun of conquering the problems themselves.
> Teachers can see both a summary of the performance of their students 
> in each stream the students are enrolled in, and inspect all of their 
> submissions.  Some schools have used the Challenge as an in class 
> activity for 5 weeks, others have created lunch time clubs for working 
> on problems, while others still have just set them as fun after school 
> extension material for gifted students.  We have been particularly 
> pleased to hear stories of students rushing to the whiteboard to 
> discuss how to solve the problems.  In a couple of cases, we've heard 
> of schools using some questions as assessment tasks.
>
> There are also separate teacher only forums to discuss how your 
> students are finding the questions and share ideas and resources with 
> other teachers.
>
> New in 2013: Grok Learning
>
> The NCSS Challenge team have started a company, Grok Learning Pty Ltd.
> Our goal in starting Grok Learning is to do more: more students in 
> more countries; more intelligent auto-marking; more courses, projects 
> and competitions running more times each year.  We will make NCSS 
> Challenge-like courses available throughout the year (so you can teach 
> programming whenever it suits you), and introduce many new courses in 
> the next few months, including other programming languages, and 
> technologies including SQL and HTML/CSS.  This will all be available 
> through an simple annual subscription for students and teachers of $30 
> (signing up through their schools) or $100 (students signed up 
> directly by their parents), which is the familiar pricing model used by Mathletics.
>
> We have also developed an entirely new learning environment and 
> auto-marking system.  The learning environment now allows students to 
> edit and run programs directly in the browser (although we still 
> strongly recommend installing Python locally, so students can write 
> programs independently).  Each snippet of code in the notes can be run 
> and modified.  Challenge questions are now directly integrated with 
> the learning materials, which have been broken up into more manageable 
> slide-sized chunks.  Hopefully students will find the learning 
> materials less daunting now, and will be able to navigate back a few 
> slides to find the concepts they need to solve each problem.
>
> Finally, we have made the move from teaching Python 2 to Python 3.  
> Python
> 3 involves backwards incompatible changes in the Python language syntax.
> For beginner programmers, the changes are not difficult (the most 
> obvious change is that the print statement is now a function, and so 
> must be called with parentheses).  Python 2 programs will be marked as 
> incorrect by the marking system, and so you must install a new version of Python.
> We recommend you install Python 3.3.2<http://www.python.org/download/>
> from the Python website.
>
> If you have any questions, please email 
> challenge at ncss.edu.au<mailto:challenge at ncss.edu.au> or ring me on (02)
> 9036 9712<tel:%2802%29%209036%209712> or 0407 020 
> 099<tel:0407%20020%20099>.
>
> We look forward to seeing you and your students on the NCSS 
> Challenge<https://groklearning.com/challenge/teachers?utm_source=cstea
> chers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=challenge-2013>
> site!
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Nicky
>
>
> ---
>
>
> NICKY RINGLAND
> Outreach Officer | National Computer Science School | 
> http://www.ncss.edu.au<http://www.ncss.edu.au/>
> PhD student | School of Information Technologies | Faculty of 
> Engineering and IT
>
> THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
> Room 444 | Building J12 | The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006 T +61 
> 2 9036 9712 | F +61 2 9351 3838 | M +61 407 020 099 E 
> challenge at ncss.edu.au<mailto:challenge at ncss.edu.au> | W 
> https://groklearning.com/challenge<https://groklearning.com/challenge?
> utm_source=challenge&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=footer>
>
>
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