Current News

Check out this Calvin News article on Prof. Keith VanderLinden’s Interim 2012 course on using AppInventor to create smartphone apps.

The Calvin News Service recently posted this news story about the Computer Science and Information Systems club “Abstraction”.

Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and Rep Jarod Polis (D-CO) have reintroduced the Computer Science Education Act, which aims to reverse the decline in CS in K-12 education. This is a revival of the act that Rep. Polis introduced in 2010, which died after the elections.

This 2011 act was introduced on Sept 22 in the Senate as S. 1614 and in the House as H.R. 3014.

If you want to help increase the visibility of CS education in K-12 education, please contact your U.S. representative or senator - especially if they are on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; or the House Committee on Education and the Workforce - and let them know you support this act.

A San Diego Times article reports that according to National Association of Colleges and Employers data, 2011 college graduates with computer science majors received more job offers than any other college major.

To see why, check out our page about the Computing Careers Market.

Professor Keith Vander Linden returned from a 2010-2011 sabbatical in Sydney, Australia. He worked on a project with CSIRO, the Australian national research laboratory, and Centrelink, the Australian government’s service delivery organization for health and human services.

The project team developed a system that produced tailored information brochures for Centrelink’s student entitlement programs. The work is being presented at two conferences this summer:

- the 12th Conference on Digital Government Research in Washington

- the 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering at the Googleplex in Mountain View

Starting in September 2011, Calvin’s CS/IS department will begin after-school computing clubs in one area high school and one area middle school. The Computing Clubs, tentatively named “teCreate”, will emphasize allowing students to have fun creating using technology. The main goal of the clubs is to give high school and middle school students an opportunity to experience the joy found in being able to program. Professors from Calvin’s CS/IS department will introduce clubs to various graphical programming languages, like Scratch, Alice, and Kodu, as well as programming Scribbler 2 robots, creating apps for smartphones, creating games, etc.

In future years the goal is to expand offering these clubs in more schools in the Grand Rapids area.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, between now and 2018, there will far more jobs in software engineering than in all other kinds of engineering combined, and far more network administration/analysis jobs than (non-software) engineering jobs combined. See our Computing Careers Market page for the details.

Relatedly, CNN-Money magazine recently rated Software Architect as their Best Job In America.