<style> .figure-number { display: none; } </style> Yesterday, the Daedalus Scholars were visited by Peter Boyce. Peter's been a friend for years and is my go to guy when I'm looking talk startups, venture capital and many things tech. Peter's with General Catalyst Partners and is a co-founder of Rough Draft Ventures - a fund that invests in student entrepreneurs. I'm teaching Hunter's first class of Daedalus Scholars - Hunter's new CS Honors program.

If you keep Emacs open all the time you end up accumulating lots of buffers. That can make navigating a little bit awkward. Projectile is a really nice package that makes navigating in and between projects much easier. I also have counsel-projectile installed. Here's my configuration: ;; projectile (use-package projectile :ensure t :config (projectile-global-mode) (setq projectile-completion-system 'ivy)) (use-package counsel-projectile :ensure t :config (counsel-projectile-on)) Projectile considers a sub-directory tree to be a project if it's a git or other source control repo, if it's created by tool like lein, maven, or sbt, or if you put an empty file named .

This morning, Mark Guzdial wrote about Stanford possibly moving away from Java as their intro language. This comes on the heels of a semi-regular thread on one of the lists I'm on asking about what languages are used at assorted colleges around the country. Invariably the Pascal -> C++ -> Java progression of APCS turns up in these threads. There are plenty of arguments to be made both for and against pretty much any language or platform.

When I started using git and GitHub with my students it was a natural progression having started with started with CVS and then, as technology changed moving through Subversion and then Mercurial. It was all about using sensible professional software development techniques while making it easier for students to submit work and for me to evaluate their submissions. Over time, I found that git and GitHub in fact provided some extra support for educators right out of the box.

Last Friday, Mark Guzdial wrote about the woes of using clickers in a class. The amount of effort required to use his school's approved clicker technology sounds ridiculous so while we need tools to better engage students in large class settings we need better tools that can be integrated into our classes more easily. I've never used clickers. On top of stories like Mark's, there are a number of problems with using clickers in a public school.

I wanted to write this up earlier but, as so frequently happens all my dormant work projects decided it was time to rise up and demand instant attention. When we left off, we had students pulling code and submitting homework via github. Form here, it's an easy step to have them working on a small project in their own repo. In fact, sometimes, I'll jump right to a two person project where one person creates the repo and invites the other (and me) as a collaborator.

Note: Just for some quick context. The process I started to describe in the last post and continue here chronicles what I did at Stuy with high schoolers. Now that I'm at Hunter college, I'm adapting the process but the overarching themes remain the same. Post starts here: Now that your students have been pulling the classcode repo regularly it's time to move to the next step - adding and pushing files to a repo.

Both at and prior to SIGCSE 2017, I promised to write up the steps I take to introduce and use revision control systems in my classes. This series is not meant to be a git or GitHub tutorial. There are plenty of those already (two of which I've linked to below). This is about the process I use with my students to get them up to speed. As with any new tool, there will be some resistance but once git saves them once, they get religion.

As a high school teacher, I was never able to attend SIGCSE, the conference of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. Between the number of instructional days I would lose and the cost, I could never justify going. Instead I looked over the proceedings and read many of the papers. Now that I'm at Hunter, I was finally able to attend. This year in Seattle, the conference ran from Wednesday through Saturday.

Tomorrow morning I fly out to Seattle for SIGCSE 2017. For those of you not in the CS Education space, SIGCSE is the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) special interest group for computer science education. I've wanted to go for years but have never been able. It's hard for a high school teacher to miss a week in mid March, particularly in places with a school calendar similar to New York.