[Yr11 Information Technology] [Oz-teachers] NCSS Challenge 2013 begins August 5th

[Barnard, Laureen O]

My Unit 2 class will be enrolling on Monday (as soon as I have the school credit card in my hot little hands) :)

On 28/07/13 8:13 PM, "Roland Gesthuizen" <rgesthuizen at gmail.com<mailto:rgesthuizen at gmail.com>> wrote:

We now have 37 kids enrolled at our school.  Getting excited as we count down and hoping that more of you can join us. I'll be giving it a tryout too.

If i can share a secret, it isn't some kind of evil puzzle for code nerds but a gradual learning journey with many, many, many guides on the side. Read the questions, make use of all the online resources, especially discuss problems on the forums and talk about challenges afterwards as a class. We learned about persistence, reflection and especially the power of computational thinking.

On the Monday 5 August launch (9pm Melbourne time) we will be running another ACCELN Hangout, talking live with some of the Grok Learning staff who are working hard to make this magic happen: Join us
http://acceln.wikispaces.com

Regards Roland

PS: If you tune in on Monday 29 July you can hear about plans for the ACEC2014 conference as they have launched their cool new website http://acec2014.acce.edu.au/

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

On 26/07/2013, at 9:28 PM, Sue Bicknell <sue.bicknell at gmail.com<mailto:sue.bicknell at gmail.com>> wrote:

Thank you, that is just what I needed. Probably better steering my group onto a Scratch challenge, or maybe code academy?

On Friday, July 26, 2013, Sybille wrote:
Sue

I did it a couple of years ago in my IT lessons, ie 3-4 hours a week and the kids still had to work from home and we ran an afternoon session or 2 as well. They really need to be interested.

This year I'm trying it as an external project as the school I'm in does not do middle school IT and I am running 2 after school sessions of an hour+ and advising them they will have to work at home also.

Its pretty time consuming but some loved it and were working at home in groups happily, others found it too hard and gave up after week 2 or so.

You can do lots without computers, they email you the tutorial and the questions so you can plan your answer before getting anywhere near Python on the computer. Then you need some time to test your result, and possibly tweak your answers. Some student prefer to do it all online.


Sybille
----- Original Message -----
From: Sue Bicknell
To: Professional community for teachers
Cc: eChalk mailing list
Sent: Friday, July 26, 2013 7:31 PM
Subject: Re: [Oz-teachers] Fwd: NCSS Challenge 2013 begins August 5th

This has me intrigued and I have a few 12 year olds interested. Can anyone give me an idea about how much time might need to be committed over the 5 weeks of the challenge? I can run a lunchtime session and probably get some class time allocated, but how much is in question. I also see reference to off computer work but do not know how much work on th eproblems can be done before entering the data.
Sue

On Wednesday, July 10, 2013, Roland Gesthuizen wrote:
The NCSS challenge is really worth 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 cool to hand out some IT certificates at a school assembly for a change. Go for IT

Regards Roland @rgesthuizen

Begin forwarded message:

From: Nicky Ringland <challenge at ncss.edu.au>
Date: 10 July 2013 5:40:54 PM AEST
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 NC<https://groklearning.com/challenge/teachers?utm_source=csteachers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=challenge-2013>

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--
Sue

The rut hungers for the soul

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