ACM and its partners have launched the first-ever Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) to bring greater attention to the need to improve computer science (CS) education at the K-12 level. “The conversation about computer science education speaks directly to the issues of innovation, competitiveness, and a healthy future,” says ACM CEO John White. Computers are becoming more ingrained in everyday life, but the percentage of high schools offering rigorous computing courses fell from 40 percent to 27 percent from 2005 to 2009. Created by a U.S. House of Representatives resolution, CSEdWeek views CS education as a critical element of the national science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) movement, and not as an add-on or an optional course. Best practices for CS education are highlighted on the Web site www.csedweek.org, which serves as the central hub for CSEdWeek. The site offers computer science curriculum guides, data, research, posters, and brochures, and provides a platform for sharing ideas on improving CS education. CSEdWeek is the second week in December, and was chosen in honor of computer science pioneer Grace Murray Hopper, who was born on Dec. 9, 1906. ACM is leading the joint effort of the Computer Science Teachers Association, the Computing Research Association, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, the Anita Borg Institute, the National Science Foundation, Google, Intel, and Microsoft.

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A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research group beat out about 4,300 other teams on Saturday in a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) contest to test human social networking. DARPA released 10 eight-foot weather balloons across the continental United States on Saturday and challenged competitors to correctly identify the longitude and latitude coordinates for each balloon as quickly as possible. The first team to correctly identify the location of all 10 balloons won $40,000. The MIT group set up a Web site asking people to join their team and offered to share the prize money with people who offered correct information. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to perform an experiment at a massive scale,” says MIT’s Riley Crane, part of a group of researchers that study human interactions involving computer networks. Crane describes the MIT strategy as a “recursive incentive structure.” The MIT researchers received contributions from 4,665 participants. They said their techniques could be used for finding criminals and missing children, as well as possibly stopping impending terrorist attacks. “They got a huge amount of participation from shockingly little money,” says DARPA’s Peter Lee.

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