Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child in Summit, NJ, will be actively participating in Computer Science Education Week from December 5-11, 2022, with daily coding and computing activities across all grade levels. Parents and caregivers can reinforce these in-school activities with assignments at home. Here are some suggestions and some helpful web resources.

It’s time to give our loyal blog readers the edge on locating the best education technology gifts for their budding Scientists, Technologists, Engineers, Artists, and Mathematicians.

Every year, Santa’s Chief Technology Elf Bernard creates a list of recommendations for Santa. Miraculously, that list has somehow fallen into our hands every year for the past seven years. 

This year, Santa’s North Pole Server (the one Santa uses to store and manage all the millions of Christmas lists he’s sent) was attacked. About two weeks ago, an unidentified elf opened a malicious email causing all the data on this precious server to be encrypted. 

This ransomware attack put the whole Christmas operation in peril with The Clause Family and all the elves rendered incapable of checking any lists, checking them twice, and finding out who's been naughty or nice. CTE Bernard reached out to the expert tech team at Oak Knoll who were able to track down the malicious code and decrypt the data without the need for a single bitcoin in payment. As a thank you, Bernard voluntarily shared his tech recommendations (which are normally for Santa’s eyes only) with the Oak Knoll community with the caveat that we use it responsibly.

When asked if Bernard would also share the list of who’s been naughty or nice, he flatly refused. We’ll just have to assume everyone in the Oak Knoll community has been nice this year (which we think is a pretty safe bet.)

Here’s Bernard the Elf’s suggestions for best tech-related education gifts this Christmas Season across a variety of price ranges.

Global Maker Day will be celebrated on October 18, 2022. Founded by a group of volunteer educators, the day brings together “makers” from around the world to participate in local maker space events and share ideas and projects globally. Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child Lower School students will be participating in the detailed series of challenges that will be released prior to the event and making good use of our IDEAS Lab, but anyone can participate from anywhere in the world.

As I write this blog, we are midway through celebrating 2018 Computer Science Education Week. Nationally there are workshops, webinars, coding challenges, and all kinds of events geared at getting kids interested in computer science and computational thinking. Many articles have been written about the need to get the next generation of students interested in computer science as they will be competing with robots and artificial intelligence for jobs, and that without understanding computing this next generation will fall behind. We are all searching for that one activity that will set off the light bulb for our students, granting them access to a new world of understanding.

The resurgence of the sciences in curriculum, particularly at the elementary school level, has occurred under the banner of STEM – science, technology, engineering and math. Like nearly every other aspect of education, this is ever-evolving and, in recent years, has grown into STEAM by incorporating the arts.