How are we going to deal with grades? This has garnered a lot of attention since COVID-19 struck. Over on the AP side people wonder if colleges will give credit? Do the tests mean anything? What about the material they won't be testing? We also have had standardized tests canceled and a variety of grading policies. I'm going to stay away from AP this time around - you all know my feelings about the college board.

As we scrambled to move online in March we used what we knew, what we heard of and what we were allowed. This usually meant Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. I settled on Zoom. It worked and worked pretty well. There were a few things I felt they could improve on but given that Zoom wasn't designed as a teaching tool I've been pretty happy with it. Now that the emergency rush has passed we have time to see if there are some better alternatives.

I made this video write after I made the openwith one so even though I don't mention anything in this video, I wanted to share some updates on dired and openwith. I got a lot of suggestions on alternate ways to achieve the workflow I was seeking - being able to open a file using an external viewer. One person noted that under newer versions of Emacs, the W key is bound to the command (browse-url-of-dired-file) which does exactly what I wanted.

Yesterday's post on errors led to some interesting discussion over on Facebook. Specifically on teaching students to use a debugger. My contention is that while it's easy to demonstrate a debugger it's hard to get student buy in. In my CS0, we start with Thonny which has a great integrated debugger. In my CS1 I also show and use gdb. Regardless of my approach the subset of students who actively end up using the debugger has remained both constant and small.

Programming is amazing. You get the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. It's a great feeling when you write something and it works - even it it's small and simple. It also feels good to hunt down, discover and eliminate subtle bugs in our code. On the other hand, I'll frequently feel like a bozo when I pour over my code for days only to find a super silly error.

Almost four and a half years ago I left Stuyvesant and joined Hunter College. One of the initiatives I was charged with was the creation of a computer science honors program - the Daedalus scholars. Now, a little over four years later, our first cohort is graduating. I'm super proud of that first cohort and what we've collectively been building. I joined Hunter at the end of January 2016 - a month after college applications had closed.

I spend most of my time in Emacs but still use the shell and browser for some things. One of the things I use my shell for is to launch libreoffice to view and edit docx files and spreadsheets, evince for pdf files and imagemagick for image files. Yes, I know I can view all of these in Emacs but there are a few limitations: Emacs chokes on large files I can't edit the docx file or the image So, I hop to the shell and launch the program I need on the files in question.

I haven't been posting much over the past couple of weeks and that's partly because we've been under the weather. Yep - Covid-19. First things first - we're all either recovered or well on the way. I thought I'd write up our experience as it might be useful for others who are going through similar. This disease is weird and seems to affect people differently but three of us followed a similar path.

Continuing with the theme of alternate representations we just started heaps. Specifically binary heaps. binary min and max heaps. Heaps are one of my favorite topics in CS2. If you're not familiar with them, a binary min heap is a complete binary tree that enforces the heap property. By being complete we mean that every level except possibly the last one is full - that is 2 children. The last level is as filled left to right.

There was a comment on my last post about arbitary trees on Reddit talking about how this type of data structure was a hold over from the old days when computer resources were more limited. Nowadays having a list of children makes more sense. The comment was of course correct but I still think it's worth teaching representations like the one I spoke of in my last post. Looking at interesting and different ways of representing data and modeling solutions is one of the things that separates programmers or coders from computer scientists and software engineers.