Reading Garth Flint's end of year post and Alfred Thompson's follow up had me thinking about a couple of things. One was spurred when Garth wrote "They also have to figure out the math before they code." This made me think about all the details we sometimes take for for granted. Things that are hard for our students that we just know. It's frequently math that we might find trivial but it could also be much simpler things.

Just like last year, I'm taking in two classes worth of students in to my honors program. The challenge is that I can only teach two classes and I've got to figure out what to teach and then which students belong in which class. It basically comes down to one of two courses, our CS0 (CSCI127) and our CS1 (CSCI135). CSCI127 is a first programming experience. The normal class is taught as a large lecture with small recitation/labs.

Just saw this: Evaluation metric idea: take snapshots of students' grades each week (specifically, the grade they actually see in your LMS). How well do these correlate with your final assigned grade? Were students getting good estimates? — Austin Cory Bart (@AustinCorgiBart) May 18, 2019 It made me think of a couple of conversations I had with more senior teachers early in my career. They'd tell me "by and large, you know what the kids are going to get after a few week.

Lat day of the 2019 NCWIT Summmit. Got up crazy early, got back from my run and saw this when I checked Twitter: A1: CSTA, Twitter chats like this one, @guzdial and @alfredtwo's blogs among others. In all cases because those places start from assuming I'm a CS teacher, rather than starting from assuming I'm a teacher who is better at teaching something else. #csk8 https://t.co/6DO77fzq0j — Sarah Judd (@SarahEJudd) May 16, 2019 I don't usually participate in Twitter chats.

Now that high school seniors have all committed to their respective colleges I though I'd share some information on Hunter's incoming Daedalus (honors CS) cohort. I joke about the first cohort saying that nobody applied to the program. That's kind of true. I jointed Hunter a little over three years ago in late January. That was after high school seniors had already applied to college and at that time the program didn't exist.

What can I do to discourage my students from using the "break" statement? That was more or less the gist of the comment and it elicited some good responses. This time the conversation was on Facebook but I've seen this one and participated in it many times before. I never liked the question when presented as a "how can I stop them" one. I equally dislike when the offered advice is basically "never use break no matter what" or something similar.

I recently stumbled upon Laurie Barth on Twitter and noticed a couple of tweets about tech interviews and the hiring process, something I've been thinking about recently. Solid rant. I think the teach to the programming test market already exists. And it’s why interviewers who subscribe to these tactics get upset if a candidate admits they’ve seen the problem previously. Because it ruins the illusion that this is revealing how candidates think.

I'm a big fan of E Ink e-readers. I had one a number of years ago. An Aztak EZ Reader. It was great. Small, cheap, and independent - that is, not tied in to Amazon or Barnes and Nobles and I found myself doing a lot more recreational reading with it. I still preferred paper for technical books but for easy reading there was nothing like having tons of reading options always available.

It's spring break and for me that's always been a good time to explore some new ideas. Here's one that some of you might like, particularly if you're teaching APCS-A or something similar. Many APCS-A teachers do a unit on image processing using the picture lab (alternate resource). Image processing is a nice platform to explore two dimensional arrays. You basically use a 2D array of pixels (points) to represent an image.

Last semester I wrote about how I was introducing my students to code review. I thought it worked pretty well and was anxious to try it again. Well, I did the lesson(s) again this past week and it looks like it's a keeper. The setup was pretty much the same with some hiccups due to using a new platform. Last semester I used plain GitHub public repos. This time, I've been using GitHub classroom which I like very much but I forgot that I made this assignment use private repos which turned out to be a hassle.