{"id":59,"date":"2015-01-21T18:03:49","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T18:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/adamgregson\/?p=59"},"modified":"2015-01-21T19:31:58","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T19:31:58","slug":"fumbling-toward-competency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/adamgregson\/2015\/01\/21\/fumbling-toward-competency\/","title":{"rendered":"Fumbling Toward Competency"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a math teacher. \u00a0At least, I was until a year and a half ago when, for a variety of reasons, I volunteered to teach computer science. \u00a0Since then, I have written many thousands of lines of code, mostly in Java, taken a few courses on Coursera<\/a>, and racked up respectable scores on Project Euler<\/a>\u00a0and wcipeg<\/a>. \u00a0Which is to say I\u2019ve gotten comfortable with a subject I hadn\u2019t really paid much attention to since 1999.<\/p>\n

Now that I understand more than (most<\/a>) of my students, and thinking about the subject, I\u2019m finding myself excited to the point of evangelism about getting more students learning code (as the saying goes \u201cthere\u2019s no zealot like a convert\u201d). \u00a0Right now, only about 40% of our students are taking at least one computer science course before they graduate from high school, and only around a quarter of those are girls. \u00a0I\u2019m interested in how I can increase both of those numbers.<\/p>\n

I used to take great pleasure in saying to my radio \u201cThat\u2019s not a transit\u00a0plan,\u00a0<\/em>Mayor Ford, it\u2019s a transit\u00a0idea.<\/em>\u201d \u00a0With that in mind, here\u2019s a few \u201cAction Ideas\u201d of my own<\/p>\n