Posted by Marisa Pareti, on behalf of Women Techmakers
Women Techmakers creates visibility, community and resources for women in technology by hosting events, offering free training and piloting new initiatives with different groups and partners around the world. Earlier this year, we launched Women Techmakers in 60 Seconds, a YouTube series where we explain advanced technical topics in one minute or less.
Today, we’re excited to announce our partnership with our Google Developer Studio Localization team to expand the accessibility and reach of our content. Together, our teams will work to create a diverse user experience by reducing language and cultural barriers. Localization goes beyond translation. While references in the US might not be popular concepts in other countries, our passionate partners ensure they sound natural to people around the world.
We’re proud to produce a series that reaches, inspires, and educates the Google Developer Community all over the world. Every other Wednesday, we’ll publish a new episode discussing topics like APIs, Virtual Machines, and more. In the comments below the video, we’ll include additional resources for you to explore if you want a deeper dive into the video’s theme. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. If you’re interested in learning more and getting involved with Women Techmakers, check out our website and sign up to become a member.
Posted by Erik Pasternak, Blockly team Manager
Coding is a powerful tool for creating, expressing, and understanding ideas. That's why our goal is to make coding available to kids around the world. It's also why, in late 2015, we decided to collaborate with the MIT Media Lab on the redesign of the programming blocks for their newest version of Scratch.
Left: Scratch 2.0's code rendering. Right: Scratch 3.0's new code rendering.
Scratch is a block-based programming language used by millions of kids worldwide to create and share animations, stories, and games. We've always been inspired by Scratch, and CS First, our CS education program for students, provides lessons for educators to teach coding using Scratch.
But Scratch 2.0 was built on Flash, and by 2015, it became clear that the code needed a JavaScript rewrite. This would be an enormous task, so having good code libraries would be key.
And this is where the Blockly team at Google came in. Blockly is a library that makes it easy for developers to add block programming to their apps. By 2015, many of the web's visual coding activities were built on Blockly, through groups like Code.org, App Inventor, and MakeCode. Today, Blockly is used by thousands of developers to build apps that teach kids how to code.
One of our Product Managers, Champika (who earned her master's degree in Scratch's lab at MIT) believed Blockly could be a great fit for Scratch 3.0. She brought together the Scratch and Google Blockly teams for informal discussions. It was clear the teams had shared goals and values and could learn a lot from one another. Blockly brought a flexible, powerful library to the table, and the Scratch team brought decades of experience designing for kids.
Champika and the Blockly team together at I/O Youth, 2016.
Those early meetings kicked off three years of fun (and hard work) that led to the new blocks you see in Scratch 3.0. The two teams regularly traveled across the country to work together in person, trade puns, and pore over designs. Scratch's feedback and design drove lots of new features in Blockly, and Blockly made those features available to all developers.
On January 2nd, Scratch 3.0 launched with all of the code open source and publicly developed. At Google, we created two coding activities that showcase this code base. The first was Code a Snowflake, which was used by millions of kids as part of Google's Santa Tracker. The second was a Google Doodle that celebrated 50 years of kids coding and gave millions of people their first experience with block programming. As an added bonus, we worked with Scratch to include an extension for Google Translate in Scratch 3.0.
With Scratch 3.0, even more people are programming with blocks built on Blockly. We're excited to see what else you, our developers, will build on Blockly.
Today, we're happy to share our Machine Learning Crash Course (MLCC) with the world. MLCC is one of the most popular courses created for Google engineers. Our engineering education team has delivered this course to more than 18,000 Googlers, and now you can take it too! The course develops intuition around fundamental machine learning concepts.
MLCC covers many machine learning fundamentals, starting with loss and gradient descent, then building through classification models and neural nets. The programming exercises introduce TensorFlow. You'll watch brief videos from Google machine learning experts, read short text lessons, and play with educational gadgets devised by instructional designers and engineers.
MLCC is free.
We believe that the potential of machine learning is so vast that every technical person should learn machine learning fundamentals. We're offering the course in English, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, and French.
Yes, MLCC ends with short lessons on designing real-world machine learning systems. MLCC also contains sections enabling you to learn from the mistakes that our experts have made.
Understanding a little algebra and a little elementary statistics (mean and standard deviation) is helpful. If you understand calculus, you'll get a bit more out of the course, but calculus is not a requirement. MLCC contains a helpful section to refresh your memory on the background math.
MLCC contains some Python programming exercises. However, those exercises comprise only a small percentage of the course, which non-programmers may safely skip.
Many of the Google engineers who took MLCC didn't know any Python but still completed the exercises. That's because you'll write only a few lines of code during the programming exercises. Instead of writing code from scratch, you'll primarily manipulate the values of existing variables. That said, the code will be easier to understand if you can program in Python.
MLCC relies on a variety of media and hands-on interactive tools to build intuition in fundamental machine learning concepts. You need a technical mind, but you don't need programming skills.
As your knowledge about Machine Learning grows, you can test your skill by helping others. We're also kicking off a Kaggle competition to help DonorsChoose.org. DonorsChoose.org is an organization that empowers public school teachers from across the country to request materials and experiences they need to help their students grow. Teachers submit hundreds of thousands of project proposals each year; 500,000 proposals are expected in 2018.
Currently, DonorsChoose.org relies on a large number of volunteers to screen the proposals. The Kaggle competition hopes to help DonorsChoose.org use ML to accelerate the screening process, which will enable volunteers to make better use of their time. In addition, this work should help increase the consistency of decisions about projects.
MLCC is merely one of many ways to learn about machine learning. To explore the universe of machine learning educational opportunities from Google, see our new Learn with Google AI program at g.co/learnwithgoogleai. To start on MLCC, see g.co/machinelearningcrashcourse.
Today, we're launching a new interactive education program for Universal App campaigns (UAC). UAC makes it easy for you to reach users and grow your app business at scale. It uses Google's machine learning technology to help find the customers that matter most to you, based on your business goals — across Google Play, Google.com, YouTube and the millions of sites and apps in the Display Network.
UAC is a shift in the way you market your mobile apps, so we designed the program's first course to help you learn how to get the best results from UAC. Here are a few reasons we encourage you take the course:
So, take the course today and let us know what you think. You can also read more about UAC best practices here and here.
Happy New Year and hope to see you in class!
Originally posted on Google for Education blog
Posted by Ed Kupershlak, Google Classroom Software Engineer
Last year, we launched the Classroom API to make it easier for administrators to manage classes, and for developers to integrate their applications with Classroom. Since that time, hundreds of applications have integrated with Classroom to help teachers gamify their classes, improve students’ writing skills, build interactive presentations and more.
Do more with coursework in the Classroom API
Today, we’re introducing new coursework endpoints that allow developers to access assignments, grades and workflow. Learning tools can focus on creating great content and, in turn, use Classroom to manage the workflow for assignments created with this content. Gradebooks and reporting systems can now also sync grades with Classroom, eliminating the need for teachers to manually transfer grades.
Several partners have been helping to test the new functionality, including:
Access course Drive folders, groups and materials
In addition to the coursework endpoints, we’ve added new functionality to our existing course and roster API endpoints. Developers can now access course Drive folders, groups and materials. Applications can use this new functionality to store files in the same Drive folder as the rest of the resources in a class, or use course groups to manage file sharing permissions.
In the coming months, we’ll be adding more coursework management capabilities. When we do, we’ll post updates to the developer forum and issue tracker. We look forward to working together to make it even easier for teachers and students to use the tools they love with Classroom. Developers, please review the documentation, the FAQ, and ask questions on Stack Overflow. Also, don’t forget to let us know what you’re building using the #withClassroom hashtag on Twitter or G+. And teachers, check out this list of applications that work well with Classroom today.
Posted by Shanea King-Roberson, Program Manager
As a developer, writing your app is important. But even more important is getting it into the hands of users. Ideally millions of users. To that end, you can now learn what it takes to design, validate, prototype, monetize, and market app ideas from the ground up and grow them into a scalable business with the new Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree.
Designed by Google in partnership with Udacity, the Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree, takes 4-7 months to complete. We have teamed up with most successful thought leaders in this space to provide students with a unique and battle-tested perspective. You’ll meet Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm”, Pete Koomen, co-founder of Optimizely; Aaron Harris and Kevin Hale, Partners at Y-Combinator; Nir Eyal, author of the book “Hooked: How to build habit forming products” and co-founder of Product Hunt; Steve Chen, Co-Founder of YouTube, rapid prototyping company InVision and many more.
All of the content that make up this nanodegree is available online for free at udacity.com/google. In addition, Udacity provides paid services, including access to coaches, guidance on your project, help staying on track, career counseling, and a certificate when you complete the nanodegree.
The Tech Entrepreneur offering will consist of the following courses:
Upon completion, students will receive a joint certificate from Udacity and Google. The top graduates will also be invited to an exclusive pitch event, where they will have the opportunity to pitch their final product to venture capitalists at Google.
