Ben Scopato

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[benscopato]

Wow... Zach is a dick.

[benscopato]

‘Steal My Kisses’ by Ben Harper is my new jam.

[song-of-the-spheres]

DEAR RESEARCHERS OF TUMBLR

You know what’s awesome?  Research.  You know what’s not awesome?  Not being able to get access to research because it’s stuck behind a paywall and you don’t belong to an institution/your institution doesn’t subscribe to that particular journal.

FEAR NOT.

Here is a list of free, open access materials on a variety of subjects.  Feel free to add if you like!

GO FORTH AND LEARN SHIT, MY FRIENDS.

Directory of Open Access Journals- A compendium of over 9000 journals from 133 countries, multilingual and multidisciplinary.

Directory of Open Access Books- Like the above, but for ebooks.  Also multidisciplinary.

Ubiquity Press- Journals covering archaeology, comics scholarship, museum studies, psychology, history, international development, and more.  Also publishes open access ebooks on a wide variety of subjects.

Europeana-  Digital library about the history and culture of Europe.

Digital Public Library of America- American history, culture, economics, SO MUCH AMERICA.

Internet Archive- In addition to books, they have music and videos, too.  Free!  And legal!  They also have the Wayback Machine, which lets you see webpages as they looked at a particular time.

College and Research Libraries- Library science and information studies.  Because that’s what I do.

Library of Congress Digital Collections- American history and culture, historic newspapers, sound recordings, photographs, and a ton of other neat stuff.

LSE Digital Library- London history, women’s history.

Wiley Open Access- Science things!  Neurology, medicine, chemistry, ecology, engineering, food science, biology, psychology, veterinary medicine.

SpringerOpen-  Mainly STEM journals, looooong list.

Elsevier Open Access-  Elsevier’s kind of the devil but you might as well take advantage of this.  Mainly STEM, also a linguistics journal and a medical journal in Spanish.

[benscopato]

‘She Used to Love Me a Lot’ by Johnny Cash is my new jam.

[codeorg]

10% of U.S. students are enrolled in Code Studio (in grades K-8)

After tens of millions of students learned their first Hour of Code in December, how many have kept learning? Lots, actually!

Code.org’s online learning platform Code Studio just passed 5 million students enrolled, together with almost 115,000 teachers around the world!

10,000 new teachers are signing up to teach introductory CS with Code Studio every month. 10,000 new students are enrolling in courses every day!

Increasing diversity by starting young

At a time when US universities graduate 8,000 female computer scientists per year, we’re seeing over 4,000 girls enroll to study on Code Studio per day. Overall enrollment on the platform is 43% girls — far more balanced than the typical computer science course.

Of course, an intro course is a long way from a university degree, but most girls never even try coding. These new students now have the opportunity to get inspired and delve deeper. 

To top it off:  10% of all elementary and middle school students across the United States are enrolled in an introductory computer science course on Code Studio. Together, we are changing the next generation of computer science. 

Start learning on Code Studio or tell your local school to start teaching it.

Note: the data source for this blog is the Code Studio user database, and has not been vetted with our 3rd party Evaluator, Outlier research. The numbers measure student and teacher signups. The gender is self reported by students at signup.

[benscopato]

‘The Great Northwest’ by Mighty Oaks Oh my love, you found me at the right time.

[codeorg]

Guest post by Kiki Prottsman

Did you know that Walt Disney went bankrupt in 1923? J.K. Rowling was rejected 12 times before one publisher (grudgingly) agreed to claim Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Play-Doh was originally a wallpaper-cleaning compound.

While these might seem like...

[benscopato]

Using Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell.

[codeorg]

Many of you have asked me what is the code that President Obama wrote: it was a single line of JavaScript: moveForward(100);

That line was what it took to get Elsa to move 100 pixels to finish drawing a square, in a soon-to-be-released JavaScript version of our Code Studio tutorials featuring...

[benscopato]

To address tech’s diversity woes, start with the vanishing Comp Sci classroom

The number of schools offering AP Computer Science has dropped 35% in recent years.

Interesting approach.

"While Emma Willard's computer science fade-out alarmed many current and former students, the school has decided on a new, if untested, strategy. It will use computer science as a form of literacy, threading it through other subjects and building its principles into the rest of the curriculum. For instance, rather than using paper and a calculator to solve a kinematics problem in physics or using a shortcut like Wolfram Alpha, students might code their own script to process the problem and produce an answer."

[ragingprogressive]

[benscopato]

High school girls build kick-ass robots

Girls don’t like robots. Fredi Lajvardi heard that a lot. As a high school science teacher in urban Phoenix, he ran into roadblocks whenever he tried to recruit girls to the school’s robotics...

[codeorg]

Today, we’re finally ready to unveil an exclusive Hour of Code tutorial that we’ve been working on for months. Thanks to Disney Interactive, Code.org’s signature tutorial for the 2014 Hour of Code features Disney Infinity versions of Disney’s “Frozen” heroines Anna and Elsa!

In...

[beingliberal]

A great meme from Stop Telling Lies About Liberals, at www.facebook.com/LiberalTruth78

[yapointless]

[thecodinglove]

joomla or wordpress?

/* by BrodBen */

[obamawhitehouse]

Apple just announced that it will share its $100 million pledge to President Obama’s #ConnectED initiative with 114 schools in 29 states to help increase access to technology. Every student in these schools will receive a tablet, and teachers and administrators will receive computers and digital TV media players for use in their classrooms.