There are all sorts of awards for teachers. The Presidential awards, NEA awards, National and State level awards, and more. There are also awards and honors given in more narrow areas like NCTM for math and our own ACM. I've haven't won any and never expected to. I've never played well with the establishment. It's ok though. For every honoree that I can point to and say "there's a master teacher," there are half a dozen who you look at just know that it was more about politics and connections than about teaching chops.

A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I knew any CS teachers that were available to work this summer. At the time, I didn't have anyone to recommend. We were still up in the air on running CSTUY's SHIP summer immersion program. We ultimately decided not to run SHIP this summer. Mostly due to the fact that in my new position, I didn't have the time to do the necessary fund-raising and outreach.

I'm moving to a new blogging platform. I'm still going to use GitHub pages but after a few years of using Jekyll, I'm switching to Nikola. I think I've got the move worked out but if you're reading this via an rss or atom reader, make sure to check back in a couple of days - you might have to re-subscribe. Why am I switching? Because I hate Ruby.

This weekend, I had a conversation on Twitter with my friend Roy Bahat: @zamansky Mike, unrelated, what do you think of https://t.co/BT1ublbajF ? — Roy Bahat (@roybahat) April 9, 2016 @roybahatMaybe I'll blog about my thoughts about online environments vs local installs — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) April 9, 2016 @roybahat Agree with this but there are many issues. I'll try to write more later. Now going to see my son in @umgass prod of Pinafore.

It's been a while since my last post and a while since I started at Hunter. Time to share a bit about what I've been up to. One of the better kept secrets in New York City is Hunter College's computer science program. It's been around for years and it's been that way for years. In fact, when I was looking to get my masters degree back in the mid nineties I carefully researched all of the area's MS in CS programs.

Having just concluded almost a quarter century at one job in one place, I've been reflecting on a number of things. What I accomplished, what I've failed to accomplish, highlights, low lights and everything in between. I've also learned a lot over these twenty five years. One thing I learned is DevOps and System Administration. Back around 1993 or 1994 Stuy wasn't really on the internet. Yes, we were able to scam stuy.

SoftDev students are hard at work on their final projects. By now, they all have fairly complex code bases. This limits how much I can help them with debugging. There are some problems, though, that they have to contend with that even with experience, are hard to spot. Notably because the very tools you use to debug these errors are part of the problem. Last week, this happened twice.

Last time we took a look at implementing a Cellular Automaton in NetLogo to do some simple image manipulation. We just scratched the surface. In class, the kids write pretty nice Photoshop Light applications. Today we'll look at some more ambitious problem solving - using a Cellular Automaton to find a path through a maze. Part 1 - finding possible paths We'll use the image above as an example and a live model with all the code is at the end of this post.

We've been using NetLogo in our intro course for years. It's a wonderful programming environment. Many of you recall the Logo programming language. NetLogo is like Logo but instead of programming a turtle, you write a program that's run by multiple, perhaps hundreds of turtles and also by the world the turtles live on. Some of the reasons we like it are that it's: An easy accessible textual programming language Makes building a graphical interface trivial great for modeling Comes with tons of demo models And now, with the latest version, NetLogo programs/models can be deployed as web sites.

It's been pointed out by a couple of bloggers I follow: Gas station without pumps Computer Science Teacher (Alfred Thompson's blog) That it's International Blog Delurking Week. So, I know I don't have a large readership, but if you do read this blog, why not give a brief hi in the comments. I'd love to know who you are and what you do.