Interesting links - Women in Computing & Computational Thinking
Diane and Hilary (two very talented young women I work with) continue their road trip through the mid-west and far west this week. They visited a number of colleges early last week and finished up at the Midwest Women in Computing Conference where they presented. Diane posted some resources for women in computing at her blog. Diane left of NCWIT (National Center for Women & Information Technology) which has a lot of resources and programs to help women in the IT field and to help women get into the field. They will both be at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computer Science later this week. There are resources out there for women (young and old) who are interested in computing fields. We need to make young women aware of them so they don't think they are alone in being interested in the field.
BTW I love the pictures Diane has been posting of the blue peep who is traveling with them. Frankly I think it is an example of how people can make pictures of trips a bit more interesting. So check out the photo albums. Maybe some students will get some ideas from them for travel blogs or web pages of their own.
I also ran into Philip Wadler's page (thanks to a link from Lambda the Ultimate Programming Languages weblog) where he is collecting links to Computational Thinking information. Most of his links I have seen (and linked to before) but one that I haven't seen before is called Computer Science 4 Fun (aka cs4fn : the fun side of Computer Science) and looks very interesting.
Adam Barr has an interesting (fairly short) post on making bugs easier to find. Adam works at Microsoft where he teaches Microsoft developers to do their jobs better. He's also written a book on debugging programs. So his comments come from someone who knows what he is talking about. Most comptuer science classes don't discuss bug preventing, bug detection or software enginnering in general so this post is one I would receommend sending students to read. Ask them to evaluate what he is says and discuss it in class or in writing. The sooner they think about a systems approach to software development the better off they will be - in my not so humble opinion.
