Jody Oliver's List: Courses: Vocational

"With the Internet an integral part of everyone's daily lives for both business and pleasure, learning basic programming isn't just a smart idea, it's an essential skill for grown-ups and children alike. Learning how to build simple websites and games helps kids hone their design, logic and problem-solving skills, and allows them to express their ideas and creativity in lots of different ways. There are a number of FREE websites that teach children how to play around with code. "

"Technology has transformed education but while students learn how to use it, they rarely learn how it works. Now a growing realisation among educators that this gap needs to be filled is prompting a new revolution, in the belief that teaching children how to code will give them a skill for life."

Great Video on teaching kids to code

"It's hard to imagine a single career that doesn't have a need for someone who can code. Everything that "just works" has some type of code that makes it run. Coding (a.k.a. programming) is all around us. That's why all the cool kids are coding . . . or should be. Programming is not just the province of pale twenty-somethings in skinny jeans, hunched over three monitors, swigging Red Bull. Not any more! The newest pint-sized coders have just begun elementary school."

"You bet!  Java™ is widely used in a variety of industries. Learning Java™ in the context of Minecraft©* is especially helpful, because it provides a rich and familiar context for understanding the complexities of programming. "

Inspirational video by Zuckerberg, @BillGates, @iamwill, @ChrisBosh, @Jack Dorsey & others #CODE http://t.co/mwmIdfExg8

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Teaching kids to program
Learn the basics of programming in our first course for kids. This course was designed by Pluralsight authors to teach their own children. Now you can use Visual Studio to teach your own kids to program in C#. In this lesson kids will learn about objects, methods, variables, and for loops in a fun and creative way."

"This program aims to bring "fun" back to programming by using a small, easy to learn programming language for beginners."

With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community.

Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.

Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is provided free of charge.

MIT has a resource of 10,000 brilliant young people who represent the future of engineering and science — our students. They want to change the world, and are wiling to start by offering meaningful contributions to the national challenge facing K12 education. They also have access to some of the most sophisticated laboratory and experimental facilities in the world. As an initial test in the fall of 2011, the School of Engineering funded 38 student teams, at $1,000 each, to produce videos illustrating that the best spokespeople in the battle to engage young people in science and engineering are other young people — especially MIT students. Those videos, which are included in this site, told us that there might be some answers out there — but that we needed this to be bigger. We need to ask for a lot of help.

5 Tools to Introduce Programming to Kids http://bit.ly/kkqInS #edtech

"This post is another follow-up to something I mentioned on Twitter today. Today, the students in my Global Identity and Interaction class (I only have six students in the class) pitched their business plans to an angel investor (this person actually was a prominent businessman in our community before retiring). "

"The internet catalogue for students, teachers, administrators & parents.
Over 20,000 relevant links personally selected by an educator/author with over 30 years of experience."