Over 2000 people formed the world’s largest Smiley Face at Continental Soldier’s Park in Mahwah, New Jersey tonight. The effort crushed the previous Guinness World Record of 768 participants in Croatia March 6, 2011. The event was part of a family fun night by the Mahwah Police Department’s Youth Leadership Academy.
In 2005 the computer science faculty at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., decided to launch a major effort to attract first-year women to computer programming courses and keep them there. Professors noticed that men seemed to arrive in even the most rudimentary computer science classes with pre-existing programming knowledge—often acquired informally through online coding forums—that intimidated less experienced students. So they split the introductory course into two sections: one for true neophytes (who are more likely to be female), the other for those who had tinkered with programming in the past.