One of my laments on teaching computer science is that students are rarely taught and given the chance to develop good programming practices. There's usually not enough time. Beginners work on small "toys" which don't lend themselves to good software development practices and later on, there's so much other material like algorithms, data structures etc. to teach and learn that programming practices usually amount to lines like: "Make sure to comment your code.

A few weeks ago I wrote about introducing testing in CS classes, specifically using a testing framework. In that post I talked about the plan but now I can talk about the results. My class interleaves with Hunter's CSCI 13500 - Software Analysis and Design I class. One day each week, my students have complete a hands on lab focusing on whatever is being covered in the 13500 class. I decided to use one of those labs as a first foray into testing.

The ACM recently announced this year's winners of the Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing. Over on his blog, Alfred Thompson noted that the winners were either from independent or magnet public schools. Alfred also noted that most of the winners of prestigious science competitions like the Regeneron Science Talent Search (nee Intel, nee Westinghouse) were from public magnet schools. In his post, Alfred ruminates on this and wonders "how to we add the flexibility and support to more students at more schools?

The other day I discovered auto-yasnippet, another great package by Oleh Krehel or abo-abo. It looks like it's going to be a great way to solve a particular problem that come up now and again. There are plenty of times when I want to create a number of similar but slightly different blocks of text. The example on the project site is: You could use multiple cursors, a macro, or other methods to put in the common text but you still have to deal with the parts of each line that are unique, the red, green, and blue.

Next up from SIGCSE 2018 is John MacCormick's session on Strategies for Baing the CS Theory Course on Non-decision Problems MacCormicks's stance is that CS theory is tough the first time around and using non-decision problems is a viable approach to make theory more accessible to beginners. As MacCormick said in his paper: … a decision problem may ask the yes/no question, "Does this graph have a Hamilton cycle?" The corresponding non-decision problem is, "Please give me a Hamilton cycle of this graph if it has one.

This is a good time to be an Emacs user. In addition to all of the great packages and tools being developed there seem to be more people regularly blogging and making videos about Emacs than ever before. Planet Emacsen aggregates a ton of Emcas blogs and Emacs Legend Sacha Chua posts what's going on in emacs every week on her blog. on the video front, uncle dave has recently joined the ranks of emacs video producers.

After reading a couple of comments on my last post where I talked a bit about practitioners vs researchers I thought I'd expand and expound a bit. While there are education researchers that I very much respect, overall, I'm skeptical of education research. Note that I'm not talking specifically about CS Ed research but rather education research in general. Let's go back to the beginning. I entered teaching from industry.

Next up from SIGCSE is An Explicit Strategy to Scaffold Novice Program Tracing by Benjamin Xie, Greg Nelson and Andy Ko, presented by Benjamin Xie. The core of Xie's presentation was that tracing through code is a good thing and that spending a short amount of time teaching code tracing can lead to improved student outcomes. The idea is simple. Walk through the code as though you were the computer running your program.

One of my titles at Hunter College is Director of the Daedalus CS Honors program. It's something like a Hunter specific, CS specific version of the CUNY Macaulay Honors program. Hunter gives all its students the ability to get a great computer science education at a fraction of the cost of a private institution and if you're a Daedalus scholar you also get a scholarship, a laptop, special classes (with me :-) ), activities and more.

I really didn't know what to expect at the Creativity, Customization, and Ownership: Game Design in Bootstrap: Algebra session. I've been a big fan of Bootstrep for years and looking at the authors, Emmanuel Schanzer's been a freind forever. I've never met Shriram Krishnamurthi in person but am looking forward to it. We've traded emails and blog comments. I'd like to consider him a friend and I certainly respect him and his work even though we frequently disagree around the edges.