Just a quick public service announcemnt. Up until now CSTA-NYC has been using Meetup to organize and advertise events but now they're moving over to using the CSTA site as their platform. If you're a CS teacher you should be a part of CSTA. There's both a free tier and a plus tier which costs $50 a year. I've been a plus member since that level became available. If you're a NYC teacher, you should join the CSTA NYC chapter.

I was involved in a really exciting project a few months ago and now that it's available, it's time to tell everyone about it. There's a new book on teaching CS in K12 - Computer Science in K12. I got an email a few months ago from Shuchi Grover. Okay, actually a DM over twitter. I hadn't officially met Shuchi although I'm pretty sure we've been at the same table or group in a conference or two but I did know her from reputation.

As I said in my last post, I'm moving to a new Hugo theme. I decided on Anubis. It's simple and clean. Unfortunately, in this change over, many things broke. Specifically, all my embedded html. Using earlier version of Hugo I could directly embed HTML and it would render. Now I have to bracket the HTML with special org markup - #+begin_export html and #+end_export html. #+begin_export html <h1>html stuff to render goes in here </h1> #+end_export Minimally I had to find all my embedded videos and all my embedded Tweets.

While setting up my Pinebook Pro I wanted to make sure I could write blog posts. Go and Hugo installed and ran no problem but I switched to Hugo in April 2020 back when it was version .49 or something like that. Now it's up to .73. It turns out there have been a few changes. First, I set up my blog with two directories for posts. One for the posts I wrote originally in Jekyll and one for the ones I wrote for Hugo.

Austin Cory Bart put together a great post about supporting Black students in CS1. Cory asked about this on the SIGCSE mailing list and in his post he both breaks things down and shares all the resources that he compiled from the ensuing discussion. There's a lot of good stuff both in the post and in the links but there's a lot to get lost in. As teachers we can sometimes affect change at a department or school level but we can always make a difference in our classes and with our students.

Since posting about my new Pinebook Pro I've gotten a few questions as it pertains to teaching CS so I thought I'd give a quick update. In terms of software here's what I've actually gotten working: libreoffice (comes preinstalled) C/C++ toolchain (manjaro package install) Java (manjaro package install) Emacs (built from scratch and manjaro install) NetLogo (had to customize the startup script as per the NetLogo FAQ) Racket (had to compile from source) I've also heard the VSCode works with no issues.

I'm writing this on my new Pinebook Pro - a $200 ARM based Linux laptop. The Pinebook Pro comes from the Pine64 project. As you could figure out, they do the Pine64 which is similar to a Raspberry Pi and they've got some cool projects. In addition to the Pinebook pro they've also got the Pine Tab and Pine Phone and more. Now, you're not going to be able to go to their site and say "I need 30 of these for my class" - at least not for the Pinebook pro but it is a pretty cool proof of concept and hobbyist machine and it shows that we could have affordable devices for our schools and less afluent students.

Teachers and Police It's been an ugly few days but perhaps in some ways a hopeful few as people have been making their voices heard like never before in my lifetime. We've seen and endless stream of videos of peaceful protest and far too many instances of police officers overstepping their bounds. I keep hearing about violent protesters but those videos seem to be avoiding my feeds as are the videos of law enforcement going after the looters who are a separate group from the protestors.

I've got some CS Ed stuff I want to write but can't bring myself to writing about it today. I rarely post outside of my wheelhouse - CS, Education and the intersection of the two. I don't really think I'm qualified to say much about the current crisis. The out of control police, racism, class warfare, a failed government not only at the federal level but also in New York city and state but maybe I can share something worthwhile from my narrow experiences.

I woke up to this tweet by Mark Guzdial today:#pro-version-or ed-version.org# An indication that CS Ed in US high schools is about vocational training: 2 (of 5) recommended sessions at the @csteachersorg conference are on Github and Agile. Is @CSforAll a Silicon Valley jobs program? https://t.co/n8ugnmTU84 — Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) May 28, 2020 This led to a lively discussion throughout the day with lots of likes and lots of comments.