Dr. Veerasamy talks with the Dallas Morning News and the Associated Press about Coding for Kids
Dallas Morning News — When the last bell rings through the halls of Herfurth Elementary School, 10-year-old Savannah Schwarz races to the computer lab. She posts up outside the door in anticipation of coding club.
The after-school sessions were launched at Garland ISD schools in the fall. The clubs are run in partnership with the University of Texas at Dallas, which provides graduate students who lead the sessions, said program leader Jey Veerasamy, UT Dallas professor and director of the Center for Computer Science Education & Outreach (CCSEO). The clubs introduce students to a variety of public tools that are available online.
“We let them play and learn,” Veerasamy said. “We’re not really going through a formal lecture.”
Read about this summer’s UT Dallas Coding Camps.
Photo by MIKE STONE/special contributor
NEW YORK (Associated Press) — Want even your younger kids to join the tech revolution by learning to code? Maybe you should get them a robot — or at least a video game.
That’s the aim of entrepreneurs behind new coding toys for kids as young as 6. They’re spurred by a desire to get children interested in computer science well before their opinions about what’s cool and what’s not start to gel, in effect hoping to turn young boys and girls — especially girls — into tomorrow’s geeks.
“You really want kids to learn these building blocks as young as possible and then build on them,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview at a recent coding workshop for third-graders in New York. “I don’t think you can start this too young.”
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The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 1,600 bachelor’s-degree students, more than 1,100 master’s students, 160 PhD students, and 80 faculty members, as of Fall 2015. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.