I replied this tweet yesterday and thought I'd expound a bit. We started kids using scheme on 10th grade at stuy so did recursion early. Not everyone got all of it but it think it made things much easier for those that you more CS later. — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) May 29, 2018 We introduced recursion very early in our intro course at Stuy and I think it worked well.

Last time I mentioned the pushback on CS for All. While many people are all in for CS for All, resistance is coming from many areas. There's resistance from teachers of other subject areas, people who think it's merely job training for the tech industry (which it can be if done poorly), people who feel it will be implemented at the expense of other important subjects already on the chopping block like music and art, and others.

There's been a lively discussion on pushback to CS for All at the K12 level over on Facebook. Mark Guzdial started a sub thread asking if CS for All should first be implemented at the undergrad level rather than K12. It's an interesting question and as good as anything to get me out of my month long non-blogging rut. Mark was right when he said that if Colleges implement CS for All, K12 will likely do so to follow - just look at AP.

A fear revolving around CS For All concerns where will the money come from and how will we fit in the new classes. One suggested solution is to integrate CS into other subjects. I thought I'd write today about why I don't think the fear is valid and while integrating CS into other classes can have value, it probably isn't a long term solution for CS education. Let's start with the integration solution.

This morning, Mark Guzdial wrote about unfunded mandates and CS for All. Unfunded mandates frequently wreak havoc on schools in a number of ways but in the long run, I don't think it should have a severe effect on CS for All. Rather, it could have a big impact on the number of CS courses we offer beyond that. Mark relay's a story from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School where at the time many students wanted more CS classes but the school wasn't planning on hiring a new CS teacher.

One of the things I've heard for years from former students - both those looking for jobs and those looking to hire is that colleges don't really do a good job preparing students for careers in tech. Sure they teach the algorithms and the theory but ther are a lot of missing pieces, particularly on the practical end. I'm certainly not advocating turning CS programs into coding schools but there are many low cost opportunities to bring practical real world best practices in to the CS classroom.

I tweeted this the other day: Why don't so many teachers and professors understand that the test or assignment you can do in 15 minutes will take your beginning students at least an hour and probably a lot more to complete. — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) April 18, 2018 What led to the tweet was a discussion I was having with some students about not having enough time on tests which led to a discussion of having to drop everything to spend every waking hour on a project.

A couple of days ago I wrote about on my lab grading workflow. In the post I mentioned that I used Emacs to easily navigate between student folders and files so I can actually look at their work in addition to their programs output and test results. The key is a combination of dired and ag, Emacs's interface to the Silver Searcher which is something like a recursive code grep on steroids.

The most recent NYC CSTA chapter meeting was "How do I assess CS?" I wanted to go but it's been such a crazy month I was just too wiped out. Fortunately, the meetup was recorded. I was able to watch the first half this morning while working out on my stationary trainer which leads me to today's rare Saturday morning blog post. The meetup consisted of two panels. The first was made up of K12 teachers who taught CS.

I've talked before about unit testing (here, and here). My premise is that in addition to being an important industry technique, it's a sound practice for students studying CS. I also contend that it can make grading easier on the teacher. Maybe not as easy as an auto-grader but those have their own problems. Since I spent most of today grading I thought I'd share my current workflow and how unit tests have made me more efficient.