Last minute geek

1. The market failed rural kids: poor rural broadband has created a "homework gap"
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... to fully participate in twenty-first century life, with students among the hardest-hit victims of broadband deprivation. The FCC can fix this. Across the country, "whitespace" spectrum (used to buffer ...

2. Should a programming course be mandatory for high school students?
(English/Linuxtoday)

Is programming key to digital literacy, or are there more important skills we need to instilling in tomorrow's leaders? Read all

3. Texas high schoolers compete in varsity barbecue
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Leave it to Texas to have high school varsity teams dedicated to barbecuing. Here's a story about how some students at a high school in northern Texas are learning to compete with meat. WFAA reports: Horticulture ...

4. 13 dead in California bar after gunman opens fire
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... "A lively spot with Western decor & dancing" hosting country and salsa theme nights. Pepperdine University in nearby Malibu reports that some of it students were there: The University has determined ...

5. Instagram might be exploring collaborative School Stories
(English/engadget)

When Facebook launched, the social network was limited to students, and now the company appears to be testing a new Instagram feature that brings to mind those early days. TechCrunch reports that Instagram ...

6. Cybersecurity class challenged to hack a Raspberry-Pi-enabled "smart pumpkin"
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Frequent Boing Boing contributor Sean O'Brien and his colleague Scott J Shapiro built a Raspberry Pi-enabled smart pumpkin and then challenged their Yale cybersecurity students to hack it. The exercise ...

7. Apple investigating reports of student workers in factories (again)
(English/engadget)

Apple is investigating reports that one of its parts suppliers is illegally using high school students on its assembly line. Hong Kong-based human rights group Sacom alleges that Taiwanese manufacturer ...

8. High school class's electoral predictions model is a model for electoral predictions
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

The students in David Stein's Political Statistics class at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland have built a statistical model for predicting the outcomes of the upcoming midterm elections: ...

9. South Korea warns its 23,000 students in Canada: smoke weed and we will imprison you
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

If you're a citizen of South Korea, you're expected to obey the laws of that country even when you aren't in the country. That means any South Korean citizen who smokes perfectly legal pot in Canada could ...

10. On-trend in Asia: Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign logo
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... logo is prized for its "smart color scheme," "sensuous lettering" and "harmonized colors." The shirt was popular with celebrities and college students alike: Rapper Moonbyul, for example, wore the shirt ...

11. Wanna get into Harvard? Just ask your parents to donate a building.
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... students who are bumped ahead in the Harvard admissions queue, joining legacy students, faculty kids, recruited atheletes -- all "overwhelmingly white." Harvard has been tight-lipped about who earns ...

12. Texas high-school students can't graduate without watching a video on not triggering snowflake cops
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

The "Civilian Interaction Training Program" is a project of the Texas Commission On Law Enforcement, aimed at teaching children how not to terrify heavily armed, easily-spooked Texas law enforcement officers, ...

13. Riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna's new t-shirt line pays for girls to attend school in Togo
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... to Pasadena 15 years ago, where she would become a full-time registered nurse. Still, she could not forget her students back home: “[Tina] grew up there and she just saw all these girls who weren’t able ...

14. One in ten of New York's public school students is homeless
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

114,659 of New York's public school students is homeless, bouncing from shelters to relatives' beds: homelessness is a predictor of poor academic performance for all the obvious reasons, including very ...

15. Snapchat is a popular source for news among college students
(English/engadget)

A number of studies have shown that people turn to social media for news, and of all of the social networks out there, Facebook consistently leads the pack in this regard. But a new study from the Knight ...

16. Notre Dame and 73 other institutions secretly conspired with the Trump administration to deny birth control
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... birth control. Notre Dame pitches itself to students and faculty as an "inclusive" institution and many women who attend and work there made that choice on the basis of their understanding that their ...

17. High School students inspire amazing New York oyster re-seeding program
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... the oyster reefs as breakwaters to slow inbound hurricane-style waves seems very smart. Via NPR: The idea came from neither restaurants nor Rosenthal, but from students at one of Billion Oyster Project's ...

18. New Google Classroom feature forces kids to answer questions
(English/engadget)

... from students in class. Student Selecto... Read all  ...

19. How to use Kolibri to access educational material offline
(English/Linuxtoday)

Kolibri makes digital educational materials available to students without internet access. Read all  ...

20. Tech workers are downing tools and refusing to work on unethical projects
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... and new engineers that their work has an all-important ethical dimension. Such policies have rippled beyond tech companies. In June, more than 100 students at Stanford, M.I.T. and other top colleges ...

21. Teen offers pot brownies for homecoming votes, does not win election
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... at least eight students face possible expulsion for their roles or reactions to the scheme. “I’ve read about things across this country. It has not happened with anything that I know of in this area,” ...

22. Brooklyn College prof: boys aren't men unless they sexually assault someone at school
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... then he is not a member of the male sex." The blog post was reposted in a private group for some 5,000 students and alumni. Some students were outraged. Corrinne Greene said her campus group, Young Progressives ...

23. Beloved 94-year-old teacher visits her (now-adult) students in her old classroom
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... about growing old. Over 7 million people saw her video, including many of her former students. All of them, including Lemony Snicket writer Daniel Handler, had words of praise for her. Flossie is now 94 ...

24. Tylenol can "ward off existential dread of death and nothingness"
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... would be unpleasant, but likely wouldn’t invoke any existential anxieties. All of the students then had to read a hypothetical arrest report about a prostitute and set the amount for bail on a scale of ...