Blockly Summit 2024 Recap

Last week I went to Mountain View, CA to visit our friends on the Google Blockly team and to speak about the work we have been doing at App Inventor on generative AI, both in how block environments can invoke generative AI models as well as using generative AI models to code with blocks. Click the link to learn more about the event.

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National Winning App: The Journey of Four Seventh Graders from East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Four middle schoolers realized their dreams of creating a winning mobile app and earning a trip to the nation’s capital. Jayden Mclean, Jayden Byfield, Tristan Hitchins, and Florentz Macguffie (Left to right) won first place in the 2023 Congressional App Challenge for their app “SurVive.”

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Chalk Radio: What’s Worth Making? with Prof. Hal Abelson

In this episode, Professor Abelson reminisces about his early experiences in computer science and discusses the importance of computer education for everyone — especially children. Fundamentally, Abelson believes that computer scientists need to confront not only the technical challenges of designing new systems, but also a deeper, humanist question: “What, in fact, is worth making?”

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Case Study: Mainstreaming Computational Thinking Education

The CoolThink@JC program initiated by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust is a nine-year educational initiative which aims to provide computational thinking education to upper primary school students. Its mission is to nurture students’ proactive use of technologies for social good from a young age, and offer equitable access and mainstream computational thinking education in the formal curriculum.