We all love interesting problems. The trouble is that it's hard to find suitably interesting problems for students when they're just learning the basics. In the very beginning the problems practically dictate the solution: loop over a list and add all the elements or calculate the sum of a list of integers. Determine if number is prime Convert a word into pig-Latin It's not that there's no thought involved in solving these but the students already know the mechanics of solving these by hand so it's a direct translation into a program.

/img/cc-2017/cc1.JPG Fall in the northeast is a special time. It's the apple harvest, the leaves change colors, and the air is crisp and clean. One of the best places to enjoy it is up in the Hudson Valley. That's why I love going to Catskills Conf each year. I've written about Catksills Conf before and I usually describe it as "light tech conference meets summer camp." I love the event but I love being able to bring my students even more.

Today was my 50th Birthday. I'm usually pretty low key on birthdays and today was no different. I got up, exercised, went to work, taught my class and went back to my office for office hours. What a great surprise when all of a sudden my students from last year appeared at my office with a Happy Birthday a card and a cake: It felt pretty terrific. I wasn't expecting this and was really moved.

One thing I've learned from teaching is that there's always something new to learn. For the kids, yes, but I'm talking about for the teacher. The other day, I taught a lesson I've taught many times. Find the mode of a data set. That's the problem that they solve but the lesson is really about run time complexity, hidden complexity and using data structures in alternate ways. I blogged about this before so you can get an earlier take there although the code isn't formatted correctly due to blog conversions.

This past weekend was Catskillsconf - my favorite event of the year. I spent the weekend up in Ulster County with a bunch of my students. some great friends old and new, and Devorah. It was a great weekend but I was mostly offline. As a result I missed a rather heated discussion in the CS Ed Facebook groups. The debate was over whether or not Strong AP CSP exam results are indicative of a good curriculum or good professional development (PD).

The big push at last year's CSTA conference was the release of the new CSTA K12 standards. It seemed that every other session was pushing them in one way or another. I've been meaning to share my thoughts about them or, more specifically, learning standards in general for a while but with announcement about federal funding for CS coming from the White House last week I thought it was time.

I just read Jeff Yearout's recent post titled The Beginner's Garden of Concepts. Not directly related but it got me thinking about programming idioms. I've been using the phrase "programming idiom" for years to describe a short useful recurring code construct. I didn't realize that it was officially "a thing" until doing a web search on the phrase years later. As our students grow from newbies on I think it's helpful for them to see recurring and related patterns and programming idioms gives us a name to apply to many beginner patterns.

It's no secret that I'm something of an old curmudgeon in the K12 CS Education world and I've been critical of a number of initiatives and organizations over the years but I've been pretty quiet on the CS4All movement in NYC Department of Education. I've had and any number of concerns though. This past week at the inaugural meeting of New York City's CSTA chapter we got a taste of the NYC CS4All Blueprint.

I've been meaning to get back to making Emacs videos but I've been having trouble figuring out what to record. People have asked for Magit but I only use the basics and I think there are already some great videos on it out there. I'd also like to get more comfortable with DIRED mode and then do a video on it but I'm not there yet. I've also been looking into packages that manage workspaces like Eyebrowse and Persp-mode but neither are really doing it for my workflow.

Saw this tweet the other day so I though I would try to plug the Awesome CS Education list I started on GitHub: #csteachers...didn't I see a list of CS teacher blogs here recently? — Pam Whitlock (@PamWhitlock1) September 21, 2017 To answer the tweet, the closet thing I know to a list is Alfred Thompson's blog roll which is actually a post he wrote on his blog in 2012.