Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. – Maya Angelou

Mr. Walker's Classroom Blog

  •  

    1276_lines_of_code5

  • Dr. Nathan Yau, PhD from FlowingData.com has charted the 100 most memorable quotes from American movies, as selected by the American Film Institute, into a data visualization series called Famous Movie Quotes as Charts.  He had designed the first handful of them a few years ago, but only recently got back into the project and completed all 100. 

    Each chart is a clear visualization of the movie quote, and easy for the audience to understand.  They are beautiful in their simplicity and can be very funny in their interpretation.

    Famous Movie Quotes as Charts Jaws Chart

    Here’s a link to the big version for all of the detail.

    AFI-movie-quotes-v2-2000

  • What’s the future of the human race and our beloved planet Earth?  The Timeline of the Far Future from the BBC plots out predicted events for the next 1,000, 1,000,000 and up to 100 Quintillion years into the future!

    As it is the beginning of the year we at BBC Future think it’s the perfect time to look ahead.

    First, we brought you a prediction of the forthcoming year. Then we brought you a timeline of the near future, revealing what could happen up to around 100 years time. But here’s our most ambitious set of predictions yet – from what could happen in one thousand years time to one hundred quintillion years (that’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 years). As the song says, there may be trouble ahead…

    They had to use an exponential scale, so each inflection point represents a jump in the timeline scale by a factor of 10.  The icons are small, and some are hard to figure out.  They had enough space they could have made those larger.  The circles are also sized by the magnitude of each event, but these seem to be arbitrary.

    It’s worth noting one of the sources in the footer lists Out of Thin Air as a source.  This not a claim that they made up the information.  It’s actually a book titled Out of Thin Air that some of the information was pulled from.  I had to look it up, but it’s a valid reference.

    Nice to know that MacBook will still be around for 100,000 years!  Definitely looks like we’re in for a rocky ride though…

    Thanks to Digital Information World post on Google+

    far-future-timeline

  • hot-job-titles

  • We did this is all of my classes and I was impressed with what the students accomplished.  I hope to make this approach, and these tools, a regular class activity to direct students to learn something about Computer Science.  

    Thank you for supporting computer science and making the Hour of Code an amazing success. In 2 weeks, 20 million students worldwide learned an Hour of Code, including 1 in 4 U.S. students, and half were girls! Have you tried it?

    I’m humbled and overwhelmed by the response we’re getting:

    • “Best educational product I’ve ever come across” (adult)
    • “One of the two best things that happened in 2013” (7-year-old)
    • “I have NEVER, EVER seen my students so excited about learning” (teacher)

    Before New Year’s
    As you relax and gather with family over the holidays, challenge yourself to try an Hour of Code before the new year. Learn the basics, or help your children. And start your new year knowing more computer science than you do today. It’s foundational knowledge for everyone in the 21st century.

    Anybody can learn. Start

    Since last week, the biggest question we’re hearing from participants is, “what can I do now?”

    Here are a few ways to keep learning and supporting computer science:

    1) Tell Congress that you support the Computer Science Education Act
    It will make a big difference in giving students access to computer science in U.S. schools. Ask your representatives to support it too, here.

    2) Keep learning (for yourself or your child)
    Find local schools, camps, or workshops that teach coding.
    Or learn online.

    3) Ask your local school to teach computer science
    Your schools can teach this self-serve intro course, partner with us to bring computer science to your entire district.

    4) Donate money or time
    We’re a very lean and mean organization, and we appreciate your help.

    5) Wear Code.org shirts and hats
    5% of your purchase will be donated to Code.org.

    Thank you for helping us make history.

    Hadi Partovi, Founder, Code.org