Fridaygram: high school computer science, desert termites, YouTube sleuthing

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

Computer Science for High School (CS4HS) is a Google-sponsored program to enable professional development for high school and middle school students around the world interested in computer science. CS4HS holds workshops for teachers and provides funding to develop the workshops, along with help from local Googlers.

Earlier this week, we announced the recipients of this year’s grants, which will be the fifth year of the program (and you can see a list of previous years’ programs here). Computer science education isn’t just for university students any more.

Education leads to the scientific method, which is how researchers discovered that mysterious circles in the Namib Desert are probably not fairy circles or the work of an underground dragon, but are actually caused by termites in the sand. Norbert Jürgens of the University of Hamburg learned that sand termites eat the roots of grasses, creating the circles in the sand. That’s not nearly as cool as an underground dragon, but it seems more plausible.

Finally, you probably remember that astonishing meteor that lit up the sky over Russia last month, and you might have seen some of the many videos that recorded the event. So did Swedish blogger Stefan Geens, who figured out that he could learn more about the meteor from the videos in non-obvious ways. Geens used a video showing shadows cast by the meteor, along with Google Earth and Photoshop, to roughly calculate the meteor’s trajectory and landing place. From there, scientists figured out more about the meteor, including its size, track, and point of explosion. So this weekend, if you get inspired, you too can use YouTube to figure out something new.


Yes, meteor videos and sand termites are just part of the usual fun here on Fridaygram, where we eschew our usual developer fare and present just cool stuff instead, even if it doesn’t involve coding.

Education Awards on Google App Engine

By Andrea Held, Google University Relations

Cross-posted from the Google Research Blog

Last year we invited proposals for innovative projects built on Google’s infrastructure. Today we are pleased to announce the 11 recipients of a Google App Engine Education Award. Professors and their students are using the award in cloud computing courses to study databases, distributed systems, web mashups and to build educational applications. Each selected project received $1000 in Google App Engine credits.

Awarding computational resources to classroom projects is always gratifying. It is impressive to see the creative ideas students and educators bring to these programs.
Below is a brief introduction to each project. Congratulations to the recipients!

John David N. Dionisio, Loyola Marymount University
Project description: The objective of this undergraduate database systems course is for students to implement one database application in two technology stacks, a traditional relational database and on Google App Engine. Students are asked to study both models and provide concrete comparison points.

Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, North Carolina State University
Project description: Advanced Distributed Systems Class
The goal of the project is to allow the students to learn distributed system concepts by developing real distributed system management systems and testing them on real world cloud computing infrastructures such as Google App Engine.

Shriram Krishnamurthi, Brown University
Project description: WeScheme is a programming environment that runs in the Web browser and supports interactive development. WeScheme uses App Engine to handle user accounts, serverside compilation, and file management.

Feifei Li, University of Utah
Project description: A graduate-level course that will be offered in Fall 2013 on the design and implementation of large data management system kernels. The objective is to integrate features from a relational database engine with some of the new features from NoSQL systems to enable efficient and scalable data management over a cluster of commodity machines.

Mark Liffiton, Illinois Wesleyan University
Project description: TeacherTap is a free, simple classroom-response system built on Google App Engine. It lets students give instant, anonymous feedback to teachers about a lecture or discussion from any computer or mobile device with a web browser, facilitating more adaptive class sessions.

Eni Mustafaraj, Wellesley College
Project description: Topics in Computer Science: Web Mashups. A CS2 course that combines Google App Engine and MIT App Inventor. Students will learn to build apps with App Inventor to collect data about their life on campus. They will use Google App Engine to build web services and apps to host the data and remix it to create web mashups. Offered in the 2013 Spring semester.

Manish Parashar, Rutgers University
Project description: Cloud Computing for Scientific Applications -- Autonomic Cloud Computing teaches students how a hybrid HPC/Grid + Cloud cyber infrastructure can be effectively used to support real-world science and engineering applications. The goal of our efforts is to explore application formulations, Cloud and hybrid HPC/Grid + Cloud infrastructure usage modes that are meaningful for various classes of science and engineering application workflows.

Orit Shaer, Wellesley College
Project description: GreenTouch
GreenTouch is a collaborative environment that enables novice users to engage in authentic scientific inquiry. It consists of a mobile user interface for capturing data in the field, a web application for data curation in the cloud, and a tabletop user interface for exploratory analysis of heterogeneous data.

Elliot Soloway, University of Michigan
Project description: WeLearn Mobile Platform: Making Mobile Devices Effective Tools for K-12. The platform makes mobile devices (Android, iOS, WP8) effective, essential tools for all-the-time, everywhere learning. WeLearn’s suite of productivity and communication apps enable learners to work collaboratively; WeLearn’s portal, hosted on Google App Engine, enables teachers to send assignments, review, and grade student artifacts. WeLearn is available to educators at no charge.

Jonathan White, Harding University
Project description: Teaching Cloud Computing in an Introduction to Engineering class for freshmen. We explore how well-designed systems are built to withstand unpredictable stresses, whether that system is a building, a piece of software or even the human body. The grant from Google is allowing us to add an overview of cloud computing as a platform that is robust under diverse loads.

Dr. Jiaofei Zhong, University of Central Missouri
Project description: By building an online Course Management System, students will be able to work on their team projects in the cloud. The system allows instructors and students to manage the course materials, including course syllabus, slides, assignments and tests in the cloud; the tool can be shared with educational institutions worldwide.


Andrea Held is a Program Manager on the University Relations team at Google. She grew up in Germany and has lived in California for almost 30 years.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google Code University: New Materials and SIGCSE

By Andrea Held, Google Code University

With SIGCSE kicking off today, we are happy to announce that we pushed a small - but fresh - addition of course materials to Google Code University, a growing repository of open access Computer Science materials. With the credit belonging to Berkeley and UC San Diego, there are now more Distributed Systems materials available which complement some of the other CS resources. As usual, the materials are Creative Commons licensed allowing adaptations and modifications to fit new course designs.

We'll also be participating and presenting at SIGCSE, so be sure to chat with us if you'd like to contribute course materials, or you're welcome to discuss in the forum.

Announcing Data Intensive Scalable Computing in Education Workshop

By Christophe Bisciglia, Senior Software Engineer

For the last year or so, we've been telling you about educational and research partnerships resulting form our Academic Cloud Computing Initiative. We've shared educational material resulting from our extensive partnership with the University of Washington and partnered with the National Science Foundation to directly engage the research community and provide access to a large scale, data intensive computing cluster.



Why? Because big data is cool; it drives nearly everything we do here at Google and provides unprecedented opportunities for understanding science in new ways. It's been an exciting year learning how to work with the academic community in this space, and we'd like to start sharing that with other passionate educators.

To that end, we've worked with our academic partners to offer a two and a half day NSF-sponsored workshop, hosted at UW, which will focus on providing material and curricular support to undergraduate computer science educators seeking to address big data in the classroom. This will largely focus on material that can be found on Google Code University, but will include practical lab components so educators can get their hands dirty with the open source platforms and the tools necessary to offer a class.

Interested faculty should feel free to apply for attendance here. The NSF has provided support to cover expenses for those selected to attend.

Google Code University: CS Educational Materials

By Noel Gorelick, Software Engineer

Last summer we launched a site aimed to help educators and students alike become more familiar with the technology behind Google and the massive internet in general. Recently, we've redesigned that site and given it a fresh name: welcome Google Code University.

Google Code University is a growing repository of computer science educational material including tutorials, lecture slides, and videos. Since the initial launch last summer, we've added a lot of new content -- for example, a few months ago we blogged about course material that the University of Washington developed with us on large-scale distributed computing. Recently, we've added tutorials on MySQL and Subversion. And there's a new series of lectures from an introductory web programming class taught at the University of Washington. The site's still growing, and we'll keep adding more content in the coming months.

Most importantly, most of the course materials are Creative Commons licensed, so we encourage educators and students to reuse and build upon them. If you have questions, comments, or materials you'd like to share, please visit the forum. We'd love to hear your feedback and have you contribute to the site.

Class projects and science on Google Code

Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Open Source Team

I'm always tickled when someone finds a creative use for one of our products that never even occurred to me. So when George K. Thiruvathukal told me that he is having his Open Source Practicum students use Google Code to host their projects for his class this semester, I had one of those "Why of course!" moments.

George is a Computer Science professor at Loyola University of Chicago (my alma mater!) and he felt that using Google Code would be an ideal way to introduce his students to open source best practices, software development tools, and collaborative software development at the same time--a perfect match for a class on writing open source software. He also had his students label their projects with comp412.cs.luc.edu, so he just has to search for label:comp412.cs.luc.edu on Google Code and he can quickly find out what his students have been up to (although maybe that's not so good if anyone has been procrastinating!).

But George had some other ideas--he also wrote an article for Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE) magazine called Project Hosting: Expanding the Scientific Programmer's Toolbox (pdf). His article encourages scientists to consider sharing software in the manner that open source communities do, and he uses Project Hosting at Google Code as an example of how to do it.

I think that these are both great ideas and we'd love to see more classes and scientists using Google Code for their open source work. If you're using Google Code for something interesting or unusual (and open source!), be sure to let us know.