Our learners in Navy Band and Auburn Band are learning to read, analyze, write, and debug Python programs. As part of their experience, the kids spend a significant portion of each Computer Science block creating programs to solve coding challenges.
Creating a program to solve a challenge often takes significant cognitive work. It isn’t just the syntax of Python that one needs to know….
Read MoreBuild Weeks are a part of the rhythm of the yearly calendar at Long-View, opening our schedule up to allow us to dive into special activities and challenges. Build Weeks help us grow intellectually, help us make connections between disciplines, give us a chance to break the “routine” of school life, and give us an opportunity to try new things.
Build Week #5 involved an undercover op led by senior CIA agents but executed by Long-View junior CIA agents. We first found out that our math teacher, Mr. Moore, who is (suspiciously) a very private person, actually had a prior career within the CIA. Because of his prior relationship and due to a particularly pressing problem his ex-colleagues were tackling, a CIA unit based in Austin reached out to Agent Ames (aka Mr. Moore) to engage the Long-View students in an effort to leverage their stellar computer science skills....
Read MoreBuild Weeks are a part of the rhythm of the yearly schedule at Long-View. Build Weeks periodically bridge academic blocks and open our schedule up to allow us to dive into special activities and challenges. Build Weeks help us grow intellectually, help us make connections between disciplines, give us a chance to reflect and set goals, and give us an opportunity to try new things.
During our first Build Week at the start of the year, our focus was on building our community, as well as developing the mindsets that serve Long-View learners….
Read MoreRight now in Computer Science/ Coding we are learning about a very powerful tool – loops. Loops describe when we repeat an action for every item in a group or while a certain condition is true. Thus, we have two types of loops when programming with Python – for loops and while loops.
It can be helpful to think of loops in our everyday lives. Take icing cupcakes, for example. You bake 24 cupcakes and put icing on one cupcake at a time until you have iced all 24 cupcakes. Or you add pictures to Facebook and go through each one tagging your friends’ and family members’ faces until you get through all of the pictures. Both of these are examples of for loops. For each item in the group (cupcakes, pictures, etc.), something happens to the item (the cupcake gets iced, the picture gets tagged, etc.)
While loops are a little different…
Read MoreDr. Mark Lai visited our Coding Lab this week and offered up support, encouragement, and tips to the children about how computer scientists think and work.
Dr. Lai is a postdoctoral fellow at UT's Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics (i.e. he is a fascinating guy and a great mathematician-role-model)…
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