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Integrated with Schoology Learning and Canvas, Code.org removes access barriers to robust catalog of standards-aligned K-12 computer science and AI curriculum

SEATTLE, June 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ --Code.org announced today an expanded suite of Learning Management System (LMS) integrations with Schoology Learning (PowerSchool) and Canvas(Instructure). Schoology Learning and Canvas users will now have seamless, one-click access to Code.org's comprehensive catalog of trusted, standards-aligned K-12 computer science and AI learning content, removing access barriers for students and saving valuable instructional and prep time for teachers throughout the year.

With these new partner integrations, Code.org will connect its state-of-the-art computer science and AI curricula directly into the digital learning platforms of Schoology Learning and Canvas. New features like one-click Single Sign-On (SSO) and Roster Sync will save classroom time for both teachers and students by simplifying access to content and automating arduous and time-consuming tasks, like uploading course materials and assignments.

"Code.org is on a mission to make K-12 computer science education accessible for everyonea key part of that mission includes reducing the burden of classroom management on teachers giving them more time for instruction," said Karim Meghji, chief product officer of Code.org. "Integrating with Schoology Learning and Canvas builds on Code.org's commitment to empowering teachers with the tools they need to thrive in the classroom and provide high-quality computer science education to all students."

Removing access barriers to digital learning content and curricula has long proved difficult in the classroom, with the burden of setting up and managing access often falling to teachers who are not given the time or resources to do so successfully. According to data from the Pew Research Center, 84% of teachers believe there is not enough time in the day to get all of their work done, with factors like classroom prep and administrative tasks taking up significant time. As a result, students lose out on the instructional time necessary for high quality computer science and AI learning experiences.

Over the last year Code.org has collaborated closely with teachers and students to build platform integrations designed to simplify the classroom experience. Early feedback reveals excitement from teachers around the country for these new integrations, many feeling relieved and delighted that previously onerous tasks like rostering, workflow management, and student access are now effortless.

Improving the teacher experience has always been a core part of Code.org's mission to make K-12 computer science education accessible for everyone. Code.org has launched a series of tools in the last year designed to reduce stress and save classroom time spent on administrative tasks, including the AI Teaching Assistant, which offers AI-enabled project assessment for computer science teachers. The expansion of LMS integrations is the next phase of Code.org's commitment to empowering teachers with tools designed to alleviate workload and free up valuable time in the day for fostering meaningful connections with students.

For more information on accessing Code.org curriculum through your school or district's LMS platform, visit http://www.code.org/lms.

About Code.orgCode.org is a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to computer science in schools and increasing participation by young women and students from other underrepresented groups. Our vision is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science as part of their core K-12 education. The leading provider of K-12 computer science curriculum in the largest school districts in the United States, Code.org also created the annual Hour of Code campaign, which has engaged more than 15% of all students in the world.

SOURCE Code.org

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Code.org Partners with PowerSchool and Instructure to Bring Computer Science and AI Learning Seamlessly into ... - PR Newswire

The UK's ambitions to be a tech superpower could be jeopardized by a stark decline in girls studying computing, King's College researchers have warned.

The number of girls in England taking GCSE-level computing has more than halved since 2015 since the curriculum became narrower in scope.

The report, based on a survey of nearly 5,000 students, found that girls are more likely than boys to say they don't enjoy computer science GCSE, that it doesn't align with their career plans, or it seems more difficult than other subjects.

Maggie Philbin, technology broadcaster and director of TeenTech, which promotes digital skills, said the study highlights serious concerns about female representation in computing science.

"At the moment, many students see the subject as difficult and vote with their feet if they are aiming for the best grades," she said.

The authors warned that strong stereotypes about still computing persist. When pupils were asked to name notable figures in the field, it was men such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who dominated the top 10 list. The only two women included Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace are both long deceased.

The decline has followed a change in the curriculum in England in 2014, from Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to a greater focus on Computer Science that focuses predominantly on computer theory and programming skills.

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While 43% of those who took the ICT GCSE in 2015 were girls, the figure for GCSE Computer Science in 2023 was just 21%.

"It is imperative that we see action to encourage more girls to take computing at school so they can develop the digital skills they will need to be able to participate in and shape our world," said Dr Peter Kemp, senior lecturer in computing education at Kings and principal investigator for the study.

"The current GCSE is focused on computer science and developing programming skills, and this seems to deter some young people, in particular girls, from taking up the subject. We need to ensure computing is a subject that is appealing to all pupils and meets the needs of young people and society."

Researchers also interviewed 45 stakeholders including teachers and school leaders, and analyzed 960 school documents. They found that many teachers and senior school leaders were dissatisfied with the new GCSE Computer Science specification and felt unprepared to teach it.

Teachers called for better access to continuous professional development, especially around ensuring diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI), as well as subject-specific training.

The report recommends rewriting the computing curriculum to focus on broader digital skills, promoting and enhancing teacher training and professional development and supporting inclusive computing education in schools.

"Every student should be leaving school with the digital skills required to thrive in the workplace and society," said Pete Dring, head of computing at Fulford School in York.

"We need to reform the curriculum to include a comprehensive computing GCSE that provides essential skills and knowledge beyond just Computer Science."

Calls for an overhaul of GCSE computer science come amidst heightened concerns over the uptake of STEM-related subjects. While tentative gains have been recorded in recent years, industry stakeholders insist that significant improvements will be required to increase the flow of talent into the UKs burgeoning tech sector.

A long-standing skills gap has been repeatedly highlighted as a key hurdle for the industry, with boosting female representation in the sector has become an imperative.

Late last year, research from BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, found that if current trends continue, it could take nearly 300 years for women to account for an equal share of the tech sector workforce.

The study found that 94% of girls and 79% of boys drop computing at age 14, and the BCS too is calling for a broader digital curriculum in future.

Excerpt from:

Calls grow for an overhaul of GCSE computer science as number of girls studying the subject nosedives - ITPro

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ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today announced that Wen-mei W. Hwu, a Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is the recipient of the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award. ACM and IEEE Computer Society co-sponsor the Eckert-Mauchly Award, which was initiated in 1979. It recognizes contributions to computer and digital systems architecture and comes with a $5,000 prize. The award was named for John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who collaborated on the design and construction of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the pioneering large-scale electronic computing machine, which was completed in 1947.

Credit: Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, June 27, 2024 ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today announced that Wen-mei W. Hwu, a Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is the recipient of the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award. Hwu is recognized for pioneering and foundational contributions to the design and adoption of multiple generations of processor architectures. His fundamental and pioneering contributions have had a broad impact on three generations of processor architectures: superscalar, VLIW, and throughput-oriented manycore processors (GPUs).

Hwu was one of the original architects of the High-Performance Substrate (HPS) model that pioneered superscalar microarchitecture, introducing the concepts of dynamic scheduling, branch prediction, speculative execution, a post-decode cache, and in-order retirement. He co-authored the two original 1985 HPS papers, Critical Issues Regarding HPS, a High Performance Microarchitecture and HPS, A New Microarchitecture: Rationale and Introduction, both of which received the inaugural MICRO Test-of-Time Award in 2014.

By 1987, the rapid increase in hardware execution resources created pressing needs for instruction-level parallelizing compilers. Hwu addressed the problem by constructing a revolutionary compiler infrastructure in his paper, IMPACT: An Architectural Framework for Multiple-Instruction Issue, which demonstrated compilers can generate code with far more parallelism than most researchers thought possible. This paper also pioneered architecture support for control speculation and received the 2006 ISCA Most Influential Paper Award.

For his work on architecture support for ILP compilers, he received ACM SIGARCHs first

Maurice Wilkes award in 1998. He published foundational papers on superblock and hyperblock structures. The superblock is a pervasive compiler technique, adopted by major vendor compilers and the GNU C Compiler. In academia, the hyperblock work influenced many projects, most notably the TRIPS project at the University of Texas. In 1999, Hwu received the ACM Grace M. Hopper Award, for the design and implementation of the IMPACT compiler.

Since 2006, Hwu has focused on designing and deploying throughput-oriented heterogeneous parallel computing architectures. His team pioneered the programmer optimization principles in their PPoPP 2008 paper and the Pareto-optimal pruning of search space for auto-tuning in their CGO 2008 paper for GPUs. The CGO 2008 paper won the 2018 CGO Test-of-Time Award. These works not only enabled wide adoption of CUDA-enabled GPUs but also helped the NVIDIA architecture team to improve the programmability of several generations of GPUs. The four editions of the textbook by Hwu and David Kirk (former Chief Scientist of NVIDIA), Programming Massively Parallel Processors, have sold more than 25,000 copies and the book has been translated into five languages.

Hwus contributions to education also include three offerings of the Coursera course on Heterogeneous Parallel Programming that were attended by more than 20,000 students, with 5,000 completing all exams and quizzes to receive a certificate. Hwu and Kirk are widely credited for their contributions in making the GPU the computing device of choice for the HPC/ML communities. Hwus architecture and compiler techniques have impacted billions of processors.

Biographical Background Hwu is a Senior Distinguished Research Scientist and Senior Director of Research at NVIDIA. He is also Emeritus Professor and Sanders III Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Endowed Chair Emeritus of ECE at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Hwu has published over 400 technical papers in major ACM/IEEE conferences and journals. With 29,715 citations, an h-index of 82, and an i-10 index of 281, Hwu is a leading computer architect in publications impact. Hwu received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the National Taiwan University, Taiwan. His numerous honors include the IEEE Computer Society B.R. Rau Award, the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, and the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award. Hwu is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow.

Hwu will be formally recognized with the Eckert-Mauchly Award during an awards luncheon on Tuesday, July 2nd, at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2024).

About the Eckert-Mauchly Award ACM and IEEE Computer Society co-sponsor the Eckert-Mauchly Award, which was initiated in 1979. It recognizes contributions to computer and digital systems architecture and comes with a $5,000 prize. The award was named for John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who collaborated on the design and construction of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the pioneering large-scale electronic computing machine, which was completed in 1947.

About ACM ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the worlds largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the fields challenges. ACM strengthens the computing professions collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence.ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

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Contact: Jim Ormond, 212-626-0505, ormond@hq.acm.org

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

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Wen-mei Hwu receives the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award - EurekAlert