Everybody know's I'm the Statler and Waldorf of the CS Education world. I've been known to be "prickly," which is a nice way of putting it and I'm openly critical of many programs out there. One program, however, that I very much like is TEALS. They've been around since 2009 founded by Kevin Wang, a former teacher. The basic idea was to have tech professionals go to a school on the way to work and team teach a CS class with one of the school's teachers.

Last Thursday I attended an event - the release of "Priming the Computer Science Teacher Pump: Integrating CS Education into Schools of Ed." Mark Guzdial wrote about it here. You can also download the actual report here. I agree with a number of the challenges in creating CS teacher preparation programs that were outlined in the report and I also agree with the idea that a strong CS teacher preparation program should prepare teachers to teach any (and in the case of the programs I designed, create new) curriculum but I wanted to focus on one specific item that was brought up last Thursday.

About a week ago New York State's new regulation creating a K12 CS teacher certification went live. Just the other day I was honored to be interviewed by Matt Flamm of Crain's New York in a follow up piece about it. Having K12 CS teacher certification is big and having quality programs that lead to certification is HUGE. In my view, it's a game changer. Let's Focus on high school, my wheelhouse.

I've been holding off on doing a Magit video for a while. Mostly because I wasn't using it exclusively and also because there are already a number of good Magit videos and resources out there. What changed? Along with the new version of Magin, Jonas Bernoulli wrote up a walkthrough of the Magit interface. For whatever reason, it all finally clicked. In spite of what the documentation says, Magit is not an interface for git.

Today's the last day of spring break. After the weekend it's back to the grind. It really hasn't been much of a spring break. The rain and the snow made for very little spring and between working on the Hunter / CUNY2X Internship program and reviewing applications for my Hunter Daedalus CS Honors program there has been very little break. Today was no exception - I spent much of the day working but I did take a few hours to head over to Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island.

Alfred Thompson wrote about CS education tools earlier today. I've also been meaning to write on the topic but from a different point of view. I do my best to keep up with the latest and greatest in the CS world both on the academic side as well as the professional one. That's not really possible, but I do my best. When I have a small project to work on I'll some times use it as an excuse to play with some recent technology.

I've never done much in terms of the April Fools thing but frequently enjoy other peoples shenanigans. For those of you similarly inclined I share my son Natan's take on that Passover staple, Echad Mi Yodea. Enjoy: A Historically Informed Echad Mi Yodea.

There's so much to like in the shape drawing lessons I talked about in my refactoring post that I thought I'd share a little more here. It can be argued that the most important things for a program to do is work. The most clever, elegant, creative program is worthless if it doesn't produce the desired result. All too often, beginners and hot shot beginners in particular try to be too clever too early and get themselves into trouble.

I've been meaning to write about ethics in CS education for a while. Probably since I saw this article in the NY Times but got sidetracked. I was reminded when I saw this tweet by Hadi the other day: This message is bigger than Facebook. Computer science faces an ethics crisis. That’s why @codeorg covers ethics and digital citizenship in our computer science courses. (And we’re thankful that most of the largest tech companies support us) https://t.

Next up from SIGCSE2018 is Connect the Dots to Prove It presented by Mark McCartin-Lim. This paper was presented during the same papers session as MacCormick paper I wrote up previously and my reaction to this one was similar to my reaction to MacCormick's. My reaction to MacCormick was - "This is awesome but while he's talking about redesigning existing theory courses, I think we can get a lot of mileage out of bringing these ideas into lower level CS courses.