Presenting at CSTA 2020 I noticed a few tweets and posts from people announcing that they'd be presenting at CSTA2020 - the big computer science teachers conference held every July. A common thread in a few of these were trepidation's presenters. Excited to be doing this but nervous. It's interesting that teachers, myself included, sometimes get nervous before presentations even though we present every day as part of our jobs.

At this point, we've done a fair amount of playing with text so it's time for a fun little project. We're going to generate some text "in the style" of a source text. The technique we're going to use is usually called a Markov Chain text generator. Basically a model where the next state or word is based entirely on the current state. I don't dwell on the math under the hood but in case you're interested, here are a few links: Wikipedia, Explained Visually, UC Davis Math.

When I was writing the I Speak Jive post, the first thing I had to do was find those old programs. It turned out to be harder than I thought. I found online versions but it took a while to find this GitHub repo. On the way, I seemed to recall that these might be bundled with a bunch of old BSD games so I took a look at the BSD games package for Linux.

Following up on a previous post, we're going to continue to talk about playing with text. This time, building and working with a bag of words from a text. A bag of words is a simple language processing model where you just consider individual words in a text. What they are and how many times they occur. This is a pretty simple model but you can still have a good bit of fun with your students with it.

Ever since I started looking at Magit as a "git dashboard" instead of as a "git interface" it's been yet another Emacs killer app to me. I just recently started playing with forge which allows Magit to interface and interact with git "forges" like GitHub. This allows you to work on issues and pull requests without ever leaving Emacs. Here's a video on how easy it is. The video doesn't show this but the first time you fire forge up it will prompt you for credentials.

Last week I talked about using GitHub issues as a mechanism for class communication. I thought it might be helpful to follow up on it and also felt that a video would be better than text. So, here it is, 16 minutes on how you can use GitHub issues for class communication. I don't show examples of everything like @ tagging but I think it shows some of the power of using GitHub and GitHub classroom beyond just a software repo and versioning.

By living in Emacs I get a consistent interface across all sorts of tasks - programming, lesson planning, making presentations, preparing documents, and yes, even email. I've been using mu4e as my Emacs email client for a while now. Currently, I'm using Emacs for my work email and Gmail for personal. I've been thinking of going whole hog to mu4e and possibly migrating from Gmail to a new email provider for the personal stuff but there are still a few pain points with Emacs email:

I run periodic professional development sessions here in New York with my partner in crime JonAlf Dyrland-Weaver. I call them PD for "APCS-A, similar or beyond" and they're designed to fill a professional development gap. We try to run them once a month but it's a little less frequent than that. The NYCDOE has taken on the monster task of CS for all and since they're trying to get to everyone they have to run a bazillion sessions but all at an introductory level.

Out of class student communication is always a challenge. There are plenty of options: Piazza Facebook group Slack, Discord, or other chat system Discourse, Vanilla or other discussion forum system Mailing list but all have warts. I shared my thoughts on a number of these options a while ago but thought I'd update them now. Most of my opinions hold form my earlier post. I was using and continue to use a mailing list as I can be pretty sure that students will get the email and they don't have to go to any outside site or application.

When I wrote about the HighWebEd I mentioned John William''s talk on Agile. He spoke about how the movie Airplane! was filmed in an Agile manner and gave as an example the development of the "jive" scenes. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zdCjbJ6NEfc" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> Apparently the creative team had a script but it wasn't working. The first pair that read for the role, Norman Gibbs and Al White had their owned take.