James Grubb, professor of history, is the recipient of a 2013 USM Regents’ Faculty Award for Teaching.

Regents’ Faculty Awards publicly recognize distinguished performance on the part of faculty members. This award is the highest honor presented by the Board of Regents to exemplary faculty members. The awardees are selected by the Council of University System Faculty and submitted to the Board of Regents for approval.

Teaching awards are given to faculty who have have demonstrated accomplishments in areas such as course development and pedagogy, faculty development, mentorship of faculty, direction of student research projects, and leadership in teaching improvement.

Previously, Grubb was selected as the Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for the 2010-2011 academic year. Watch Grubb give the annual Lipitz Lecture below.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH1EpucL1_0]

Jessica Pfeifer, associate professor of philosophy, has been selected as the Executive Secretary and Treasurer of the Philosophy of Science Association (PSA).

The mission of the PSA is to promote research, teaching, and discussion of issues within the philosophy of science from diverse viewpoints. Pfeifer is interested particularly in improving the PSA’s institutional memory, facilitating the mentoring of philosophers of science at the start of their careers, and making the scientific community and the general public aware of the philosophy of science and its value in public discourse.

Pfeifer has published papers in a range of topics in philosophy of science, and co-edited, with Sahotra Sarkar, The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Vols. 1 & 2 (Routledge, 2006). She has already assumed several of the jobs of the PSA Executive Secretary and Treasurer, and will soon assume all the duties of the position.

This appointment was made possible by generous financial support and co-sponsorship by UMBC and CAHSS.

President Hrabowski to give TED Talk about "The Spark," Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 8 p.m. EST. Live streaming for free (registration required). You can also check out highlights on the Live from TED2013 blog, and join the conversation on Twitter (#UMBCspark).

by Dinah Winnick

Code.org is a non-profit foundation dedicated to growing computer programming education. They believe computer science and computer programming are liberal arts that are important for everyone to know and that should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra. Their goal is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn how to code.

They have released a video that features celebrities from the worlds of technology and entertainment to encourage students to learn computing skills. An article on Mashable describes the video’s content.

Entrepreneurs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Square founder Jack Dorsey and Microsoft founder Bill Gates open up about how they got started coding. Zuckerberg says he started coding when he was in sixth grade because he wanted to make “something that was fun for myself and my sisters.” Bill Gates started coding in his teens and wrote a program to play tic-tac-toe.

As the video shows, it’s not just techies who code. Chris Bosh from the Miami Heat says he took programming classes in college and singer Will.I.Am says he’s taking coding classes right now.

“When I was in school, I was in this after school group called the Whiz Kids,” Bosh says in the video. “When people found out, they laughed at me, you know all these things. I’m like, ‘I don’t care, I think it’s cool, I’m learning a lot and some of my friends have jobs.’”

Will.I.Am adds: “Here we are, 2013. We all depend on technology to communicate, to bank, information, and none of us know how to read and write code.”

Reps from Facebook, Dropbox, Valve and other companies tout the perks of working in their offices and what they look for when hiring. “Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find,” Zuckerberg says. “The whole limit in the system is there just aren’t enough people who are trained in these skills today.”

The code.org site links to many resources, including short videos in different lengths (1, and 9 minutes) that can be shown in classes to encourage children to learn how to program.