[CS4HS] Feedback from Google on some of our CS4HS Melbourne discussion topics

[Paul Cowan]

Hi all,

I've debriefed with Sally-Ann Williams from Google (CCed) on the CS4HS
seminar we had last month, and have gathered some feedback/information on
some of the fields where Google's possible involvement is discussed. Rather
than starting a thread for each, I thought I'd just summarise some things
that were talked about during the seminar here, and Sally can chip in if
she has more information or more to add.

*Getting 'face time' with Google Engineers:* this was discussed in a couple
of contexts over the two days. One was as a general way of getting kids
interested in theoretical Comp Sci / 'computational thinking', and letting
them see what's valuable to Google (much as I spoke about); the other was
from the 'Women in CS' subgroup as a way of getting female role models in
front of girls considering CS education. In short: yes, this is something
Google really supports and is happy to help with. Just let us know! We're
(generally) happy to send engineers to events if they can reach a large
group of people (i.e. individual classrooms can be a pain, because of the
burden of travel time etc; open days etc work a lot better for us). For
smaller groups, we'd certainly love to consider videoconferencing/hangouts
so, again, if anyone would like a Google engineer to speak to their kids
please let us know!

*Getting Android hardware for mobile software development:* we don't have a
program or a way to do this, sorry! We used to but it was targeted at
Universities (not High Schools) and is now discontinued.

*Getting Google schwag (pens, pads, etc) for competitions/events:* Sally's
the person to talk to. Hassle Sally, she loves it!

*Lesson Plans, Fact Sheets, etc:* the issue of whether Google can help with
these kinds of materials ("Hey kids! Here's a cool problem to solve! Can
you do it? Now can you do it faster? With a million records?", along with
information about WHY this stuff is actually useful) - Sally pointed out
that we have some of this on the CS4HS website at
http://www.cs4hs.com/curriculum.html and I think at
http://code.google.com/edu/. If there's more you'd need, or if you end up
producing some of these kinds of plans and want us to share them with
others on the CS4HS site, let us (Sally again!) know.

*Google Data Sets:* similarly to the above, the idea of having a central
resource of these kinds of things (like the N-Gram dataset one group of us
discussed, which has many amazing uses for education) was brought up.
People are already working on concentrating this stuff, but Sally has
offered to take the lead and follow this up to make sure we have a central
repository for these and it's communicated to this list.

*The Guerillabus:* the big one! Short answer is: yes, this is something
Google might be interested in. No guarantees, of course, and it would be
contingent on the results but the fundamental premise: that, if a syllabus
which was attractive to us in terms of improving the level of computer
science education was produced, Google would be willing and/or able to
support it publicly, is fairly sound. The extent to which we were willing
to get involved is obviously contingent on a number of factors, and I hate
to be vague, but in general: yes, we are happy to speak out in public on
issues that affect us, and this is certainly one!

Finally, given there are more CS4HS events coming up, Sally also raised the
possibility of a mailing list for participants in our inaugural event and
those to follow. Given we have this list at edulists now, maybe this is the
best place? Sally mentioned that she'd be happy to point future CS4HS
workshop participants to the list so we can grow + foster this community.

Cheers,

Paul Cowan | Site Reliability Engineer | cow at google.com | +61 2 9336 4837
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