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.
