Education USA!

The story of how Neil Plotnick brought computer science to an American school riding on the back of Linux, open source and a spare USB stick.

The story of how Neil Plotnick brought computer science to an American school riding on the back of Linux and class-built, second-hand PCS!

ARTHUR R. ON REVIVING OLD COMPUTERS “Learning about how you can reuse these old computers to make them have some use rather than take up dust is really interesting.”

In the autumn of 2014, Neil Plotnick was successful in lobbying his school to offer its first computer science class. Students previously had instruction in web design and office applications, but this was to be the first time where programming was going to be the focus. The transformation officially began over one summer week participating in training from https://code.org and was among the first cohort of teachers to bring the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) www.exploringcs.org curriculum to students. Computer science has become increasingly popular as a class for students over the past decade. Numerous efforts have sought to make coding instruction available for children in the earliest grades. In 2015 Neil was invited to the White House when President Barack Obama launched the CS 10K initiative (www.computingportal.org/cs10k). It was an effort to bring 10,000 highly qualified teachers to high schools. Plotnick got to learn how teachers were bringing computer science to their classrooms. During the conference hosted by the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Women in Information Technology he gave his first presentation on using Linux with students.

Computer science classrooms are overwhelmingly Windows and Mac environments. However, there is a growing number of teachers that are embracing Linux. There has also been an emergence in the cybersecurity area that recognises the importance of Linux. Through virtualisation and cloud-based labs, thousands of classrooms are learning about how to control Linux systems. As a way of inspiration we’re going to explore some of the ways Linux has been used by his students, and the struggles and lessons learned along the way.