Alfred Thompson posted today about cheating on CS class projects. It was in response to Garth Flint's post on finding interesting projects which in turn referenced earlier posts by Alfred and me. Garth laments that it's hard to find projects that are both interesting and meaty but where solutions can't easily be searched for online. Alfred notes that cheating will happen and that it's an ethics issue. This is why I try to create a culture of sharing and acknowledging credit (that is, citing sources) but I'm not naive enough to believe there isn't any cheating in my classes.

There are things we do in school and there are things we do in industry and they're not always the same. In school we might use a learning language or an IDE which gives additional support and at times even take away language features while at work you might you might make heavy use of continuous integration tools. On the other hand, sometimes we use the same things. Java is used in schools and in industry, StackOverflow consulted in both and many schools use professional IDEs like Eclipse.

I recently did a unit where I had my students convert words into Pig Latin. I like the problem because to start it only requires strings, functions and if statements but there is some depth to the unit. We start with simplified rules: If the word starts with a vowel, add "ay" to the end of the word If it starts with a consonant move the first latter to the end and add "ay" don't worry about anything else Students usually start with something like this:

I recently took a look at the Cryptopals Crypto Challenges. It's a series of challenges through which you can learn all about crypto and crypto attacks. They say they'll eventually have solutions but since the site appears to be at least a few years old, who knows it they'll ever publish them. One interesting thing about the site is that it really doesn't have a lot of content to teach you the concepts around the challenges.

I had a conversation with my principal during my last year at Stuy. She said "whenever the superintendent or high level education people come and ask to see our best teachers I can never bring them to Jim's class." Everyone knows that Jim is the best. I describe him as "the teacher I aspire to be." What's the problem? The problem is that Jim didn't teach the way the powers that be wanted him to teach.

I spent this weekend diving back into Clojure or more specifically, Clojurescript. For those who don't know, Clojure is a Lisp that runs on the JVM. The solution it particularly seeks to "solve" is immutability. Clojurescript is Clojure that compiles to Javascript for web applications. Tooling aside, it's all pretty neat. I didn't do anything earth shaking, just a quick implementation of Conway's game of life and Snake. While the code isn't particularly good, you can check them out here (Snake, Life).

Saw this earlier today. Kind of works, doesn’t it? Does every discipline do this — decide that the way experts think in that discipline is a special kind of “thinking” or “reasoning” or “literacy” that everyone really needs and that we should be teaching to all our children? pic.twitter.com/cvNvpOMjZZ — Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) August 25, 2019 <figure><img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EC0hlfKXsAIjlK9?format=jpg&amp;name=medium"/> </figure> In a talk Mark gave last year, he also talked about "historical thinking" and other "thinkings.

A couple of weeks ago there were some discussions about students working on and in larger projects. Most CS educators think it's a good idea to expose students to large projects even if we don't all agree as to what the best time is. Regardless of when, figuring out a large project can be a bear and that's not just true for students. I saw this on my Tweetstream about onboarding software engineers:

No, this post is not about the Waterfall development model. Devorah and I had a chance to take a little vacation up north. First stop, Niagara Falls. <br clear="all"> We did the Canada side 9 years ago when we did our Erie Canal bike trip (you can read about that by checking out some of my early blog posts). This time, the American side. My take is that the Canadian side is more polished and all private attractions - think Times Square or Disney.

Last week I spent a couple of days as part of a team running professional development for a group of pre and in service elementary school teachers. Two days talking about computational thinking. Wait a minute - elementary school teachers? I'm a high school guy pretending to be a college guy. My extensive experience with elementary school education is that I raised two kids and I don't think I messed them up too much.