Right now I'm on vacation in Harrogate England. Natan is here taking part in the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival so Devorah and I came along as tourists. Today we went to Knaresborough: The River Nidd as seen from Knaresborough Castle Normally when traveling I try to get everything in and that leaves me pretty exhausted at the end of each day. Since this time we'll be here for around two weeks, I'm trying a less hectic pace.

It's August 3rd and I've been giving a lot of thought to the start of the semester. Normally I wouldn't think about the Fall term this early. While I've been working on and off since last semester ended, I don't officially "go back" until August 23rd with classes starting on the 27th. The difference is that for the first time in forever we're taking a longish trip between now and then.

If one looks at my twitter feed they'll notice that in addition to CS Ed, another issue I'm passionate about is school reform or rather resistance to what is popularly known as and mislabeled as school reform. I'm anti vouchers, charter schools, high stakes testing and more. One of the heroes of this resistance is education historian Diane Ravitch. I'm a big fan of Diane's and she's one of the true great champions of public schools, kids, and teachers.

My friend Adam posted this link to an article on the new digital divide the other day. It's talking about young people who do everything on the phone so aren't familiar or comfortable with a traditional keyboard/mouse computer setup. In the comments there were some of us who lamented about the term "digital natives" and the idea that kids these days know all about computers and technology. This led me to think about a couple of things.

I think it's time for me to start developing a CS Ethics class. An ethics course isn't a replacement for having teachers that live and model good behavior and weave ethical issues throughout the curriculum but still, adding a separate course on top of that has its merits. I'm not in a rush to create this course. I might be done in a month or it might take a couple of years.

I noticed a couple of short videos - interviews with Brian Kernighan - on my YouTube home page the other day. This is probably because I recently viewed a Kernighan video in the same series after reading this post on the history of naming grep on JCS's blog. For you youngsters out there, CS people of my generation relied on Brian's books "The C Programming Language" and "The Unix Programming Environment"to get us started with C and Unix respectively.

In what grade should students take APCS? This question comes up from time to time. I've heard answers ranging from middle school through never. Infact, years ago, my chairman relayed a conversation he had with Marvin Minsky where he asked Minsky what the high schools should be teaching with respect to CS. The answer was "nothing." This was then amended to "teach them to type." Of course this was a long time ago but I believe the sentiment was that college was the right time and the high schools don't know what they're doing and will just screw up the kids.

In addition to everything I wrote about last time there were a couple of other big announcements at this year's CSTA conference. Both announcements deal with funding. First, there is a new class of CSTA membership. The free tier remains but now for $50 you can join CSTA+. This new level of membership comes with a bunch of extras that are probably good for K12 teachers but I doubt I'll use any of them.

I just got back from the CSTA (Computer Science Teacher's Association) conference. It's the biggest annual conference dedicated to K12 CS education. I think there were about 700 people attending. It felt much larger than last year but compared to SIGCSE which is double the size, CSTA still felt pretty intimate. The conference was in Omaha Devorah came along to play tourist and we both came a day early to do some site seeing.

While busy finishing off my sides for my talk at CSTA2018 this weekend I noticed a Facebook post about APCS exam grades now or shortly being available. I'm no longer teaching high school but still fancy myself a teacher first and part of the K12CS community. We're a growing community and we're growing fast. Usually, at this time of year we see a number of people posting their results. "I had 16 test takers, had 5 fives, 6 fours etc.