Garth Flint recently wrote another post talking about some of the PD going on in his neck of the woods. Garth talks about the disconnect between the professors putting on the PD and what goes on in the K12 classrooms of the attending teachers. Here's the money quote: “Why do all college CS profs think everyone loves math? Want to turn kids off to programming? Throw math at them.”

<figure class="z_image_center"><img src="" width="250px"/> </figure> Ok, probably more knitting but Crochet at CSTA was the line used in the newsletter and it sounds better. As some of you know, my wife Devorah is all about the fiber arts. Knitting, spinning, dying, weaving, the works. We've got a loom, two spinning wheels, two bobbin lace pillows, and bins and bins of deconstructed sheep, llamas, alpacas, and angora bunnies. I even got her some straw once to spin into gold.

With ISTE ending, the next big event for CS treachers is the annual CSTA Conference. I first attended two years ago in Baltimore. Last year the conference, in Omaha was bigger and better in every way imaginable. I expect this year to be the best yet. I don't go to a lot of conferences so I don't have much to compare CSTA with but I like the fact that it's is about half the size of SIGCSE.

No,I'm not talking aboutArgument from Authority - something that very much plagues CS Education and education in general where an annointed few who may, or may not really know what they're talking about are given creedence because they've been there the longest, work for the companies with the biggest names, have the economic backing or otherwise have been given the stage. I'm talking about Proof by Authority which I fondly remember from those silly Proof techniques lists that went around in the day.

For those of you who don't know, MongoDB is a very popular NoSQL database. NoSQL is an overarching term describing databases that are not relational and don't implement Structured Query Language (SQL). In a relational database your data is stored in tables with columns - think spreadsheet where each row of the table is a record in the database. You link tables together via a common field or row name.

Today I got to be a judge at StuyHacks VIII. This isn't the first time I've been a judge there, I've been doing it for a few years now. I've also been lucky enought to have been asked to judge a handful of other local hackathons over the years. StuyHacks is a high school hackathon organized and run by students at Stuyvesant High School. Since it's run by students, the cast of organizers regularly changes.

So, it turns out that there were 601 perfect scores on this years APCS-A exam. Over on Facebook a great question was raised - what does this mean and should we celebrate this? What does it mean? There's no way to know. Maybe the number of perfect scores is just scaling up linearly with test takers. Maybe More kids are being exposed to CS prior to APCS-A and that's leading to more correct answers.

With summer right around the corner I'm hoping to spend at least a little time on some personal coding projects. There are a few work related tools I'd love to develop and just some random areas of CS I'd like to explore. If I finish them, the work projects will be web based. I was thinking about using this as an opportunity to do a deeper dive into Clojure having used it for some experiments and competitions like Advent of Code but at the end of the day I decided not to.

Now that the semester's over I've had a chance to reflect a bit on my teaching over the past year. This year I taught two classes each semester so the load was a little higher. First semester was one class of our CS0 and one of the lab/enrichment component that goes with CS1. Nothing big to report there as I've done them both before. The biggest difference was that I had to deal with two separate classes even though they're one cohort.

Someone mentioned Grokking Algorithms by Aditya Y. Bhargava in one of the CS educator Facbeook groups. It looked interesting so I thought I'd give it a once over. It's certainly an accessible book. Text mixed with cute line drawings, "hand written" text, diagrams and picture.s It reminded me of one of my favorite, most accessible Calculus books Who Was Fourier. Overall I enjoyed the book but I'm not sure what its best audience is.