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A couple of weeks ago, Barb and I were awarded Georgia Tech’s Service Award for our work with Georgia Computes!. At the same awards ceremony, across the table, was David Collard of Chemistry who was getting the Professional education award.  He’s been part of an effort (described below) called cCWCS which teaches chemistry faculty how to teach better — and the program has taught over a thousand faculty!

A thousand faculty?!?  I’ve blogged about how hard it is to get CS faculty to come to our workshops, either Media Computation or Georgia Computes.  I’ve talked to other folks who offer workshops to CS faculty, and they say that they have to invite high school teachers, too, or they won’t have enough people to run the workshop.  Why do so many Chemistry professors show up, when we struggle to get CS professors to show up at teaching workshops?

Barb had an interesting insight: Maybe it’s because Chemistry is taught to everyone.  When you teach something to everyone, you have to teach…

Computing Education Blog

A theme we’ve talked about before here: That tuition is subsidizing research.  But now it’s coming from the Chronicle which draws more attention.

There’s an interesting implication of this finding related to the higher-education “Race to the Top” funding and President Obama’s goal of having more college graduates.  If college education is actually much cheaper than tuition would have us believe, the actual cost of generating more college graduates could be made much lower than the cost of sending more kids to college.  Could we create an alternative? Could we get more Americans educated at a college-level by avoiding colleges, perhaps creating some other institution — without research or athletics?  What would it mean culturally to set up something else that doesn’t have the “college” name but has that role?  Would we just be re-creating community colleges?

While universities routinely maintain that it costs them more to educate students than what students pay, a new report says…

Computing Education Blog

“The artist has only one ambition: to master his material in such a way that his work is independent of the value of the raw material.”

-Adolph Loos, ‘Building Materials’

In my current Marketing for Makers course, someone brought up her typical pricing strategy:

cost of materials x 3 +20% = wholesale price

As someone who has spent some time in the jewelry field, this formula of cost of materials times three isn’t new to me.

But it’s also one of my least favorite pricing guidelines.  I might even go so far as to say I hate it.

First off, it fails to take into account labor, which is important to factor in when you make things by hand.  True, if your materials are more expensive, then multiplying their cost by three will probably account for your labor.   But if your materials are inexpensive (or free, if you happen to thrift or reuse them) then this formula is sadly lacking.

That’s why I prefer this pricing formula:

materials + labor + expenses + profit = wholesale price

But still,…

Crafting an MBA

There’s a challenging and interesting paper being presented this afternoon at SIGCSE 2011 Exploring the Appeal of Socially Relevant Computing: Are Students Interested in Socially Relevant Problems? by Cyndi Rader, Doug Hakkarinen, Barbara Moskal, and Keith Hellman from the Colorado School of Mines. I’ve worked with Barbara Moskal before, and know her to be a careful and thoughtful evaluator. So, when I read their abstract, especially the bottom line, I was surprised and intrigued.

Prior research indicates that today‘s students, especially women, are attracted to careers in
which they recognize the direct benefit of the field for serving societal needs. Traditional
college level computer science courses rarely illustrate the potential benefits of computer
science to the broader community. This paper describes a curricula development effort
designed to embed humanitarian projects into undergraduate computer science courses. The impact of this program was measured through student…

Computing Education Blog

Forbes has just released its list of the wealthiest people in the world and you may be surprised to discover that among the top ten, none have MBA degrees. Rather, this vaunted list is populated by…dropouts!

Microsoft Founder Bill Gates (2) dropped out of Harvard; Oracle Founder Larry Ellison (5) dropped out of both the University of Chicago and University of Illinois. Spanish fashion entrepreneur Amancio Ortega (7) never attended college, so he cannot be considered a dropout. Eike Batista (8), a Brazilian/German mining magnate, dropped out of Aachen University in Germany, while Mukesh Ambani (9), the Chairman of India’s largest conglomerate, completed a degree at Mumbai University, before dropping out of Stanford Business School – at least someone has some MBA experience, short of that coveted degree! Finally, Christie Walton, an heiress to the Walmart Fortune and the wealthiest woman in the world, did not attend college (and her deceased husband, John Walton, dropped out of…

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