Many teachers are reluctant to try new things. Sometimes it's a bad case of "I'vealwaysdoneitthisway-itis." Sometimes it's not being comfortable with the new way or not having the time to develop whatever happens to be needed for the lesson and sometimes it's even coming from a good place. What's that good place? Concern - if I try this new way and it doesn't work I'm going to lose some students and never get them back.

I organize a monthly professional development session for CS teachers. It's targeted at teachers who are beyond the beginner stage and don't want yet another hello world blinky arduino scratch workshop. Don't get me wrong, given the need for CS teachers we need plenty of beginner workshops but we also need to take teachers to the next level. I refer to my workshops as being for teachers of APCS-A, similar, or beyond.

<blockquote> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? – Brian Kernighan </blockquote> Debugging is what the third episode of the CS Ed Podcast was all about. Kristin Stephens-Martinez of Duke University speaks with Amy Ko of the University of Washington. The long and the short of it is that debugging is hard, teaching is hard, and teaching debugging is hard.

Over at AVC Fred Wilson just posted about Outschool's efforts to support students and teachers in the event of school closures due to the Coronavirus. All the details and relevant links are in the post. I looked a bit into Outschool when Fred first wrote about them but never had a chance to do a deep dive. Now, internet based teaching is not going to be as effective as in person teaching but I was thinking about how far things have come.

It took a while but we're finally here. Hunter College is launching it's Computer Science Teacher Certification programs. This was the second big initiative I've been working on at Hunter. The first was the Daedalus undergraduate CS scholars program. The Daedalus program started my first year and is now providing the best value (and in my opinion best) undergraduate CS opportunity in New York. CS Certification took longer. I had to design the programs, they had to make it through the whole CUNY governance process which even under ideal circumstances takes around a year and then up through NYSED.

A couple of weeks ago, a handful of CS Ed folks got together. One issue we discussed was that of finding CS related events both for students and teachers. One of our conveners, Dan Fenjves of UPPERLINE CODE talked about possibly hosting a central site. Today, Dan announced http://csevents.nyc/. A site where organizers can submit and students and teachers can find upcoming events. Right now it's NY centric but it does list some events beyond the city.

I've been meaning to do my version of the Emacs VI rant for a while. A few years ago I staged out a video showing what it would be like for a beginner to start with Emacs, Vim, Atom, and Sublime Text but decided it would be long, unwieldy and clunky to present - particularly when it came to customization. I tabled it for a while but recently have been seeing a bunch of threads, videos and posts talking about Emacs and Vim.

Amy Ko posted this yesterday: CSEd people: many have struggled to use Twitter for discussion. How about Twitter for broadcasting, but when replies turn to discussion, we use https://t.co/2oivuriOoU? It's a better (albeit imperfect) platform for civil discourse. Subreddit mods @AustinCorgiBart @zamansky? — Amy J. Ko (@amyjko) February 21, 2020 I'd love to see more traffic there. For full disclosure, I'm one of the moderators but in my defense, I'm not much of a moderator and as Cory said, I too am happy to either keep moderating or to step aside.

A while ago I wrote about a small side project - GitHub Org Explorer - a small tool to make it easier to manager GitHub repositories based on organization. I'm using it as a replacement for the GitHub provided Classroom Assistant. I find it more flexible in terms of exporting assignments to my own machine and it allows me to delete repos en masse which is critical after the semester is over.

Episode 2 of the CS Ed podcast had Dan Garcia talk about exam creation. This wasn't a podcast about the value of exams - in class, high stakes or otherwise. In fact Dan says in the podcast it would be great to "get grades out of the equation. Grades are gonna be an impediment to learning." But recognizes that we have not say in this most of the time (and I'll add that though I agree grades can and do perform a function) so we should be creative in terms of assessment.