In response to the past couple of days where my friends and fellow CS Ed advocates Alfred Thompson, Rob Underwood, and I had a nice little discussion via our blogs, Alfred wrote this. It's great when a number of voices in the community have an open discussion but one of the things I found myself lamenting was the fact that a lot of the discussion isn't truly accessible. Why not?

The other day, Alfred Thompson put up a piece about coding in multiple languages. Alfred references a post written last May by Rob Underwood. Both pieces are worth a look. Rob is trying to illustrate many of the superficial similarities in popular languages. In the comments on Alfred's blog, both Alfred and I alluded to coding in an appropriate style for the language. For me the issue is even bigger.

Almost twenty six years. That's how long I've been a NYC public school teacher. Most of that time at my alma mater, Stuyvesant. A couple of years ago, the school paper wrote up an overview of my career. I re-posted it here. I'm somtimes amazed at where we are now and how we got here. Regulars here also know my frustrations. To Stuy, I'm an interchangeable, generic math teacher and the DOE has shown no interested in supporting what we've built.

I wish our kids believed us when we tell them that we have the same programming troubles as they do. We stare at code for hours not seeing problems that could be a simple as passing the wrong value. We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to see the problem and then realize that we just forgot something silly. At this point, it's common for us CS teachers to tell each other "

Has everyone seen Advent of Code? It's a site with a series of programming problems that are being revealed one a day, a la an advent calendar. You can read more about it here. I came to the party a little late so I'm only up to day 6. Each problem comes in two parts. The second is revealed after you complete the first. Both students and teachers are enjoying the problems.

I woke up this morning to an email from my principal "Stuy is #1." This followed a bunch of Facebook posts by friends and alums of a similar vein. It was all about a couple of reports, here, and here. It turns out Stuy is ranked #1. Woo Hoo. We're awesome. Of course, everyone whooping it up now was quick to say "all those rankings are meaningless" back when US News and World report ranked Stuy way down on their list.

The coding on their project is reminiscent in many ways of an Ed Sheerhan song. It left me in tears and very confused as to what the author was trying to accomplish. – a student commenting on their most recent project. We had some fun last week. Well, OK, I had some fun. The SoftDev classes had just finished a little project. Basically, a blogging platform. Something that would tie together all the tools we've been using.

Last March, we (CSTUY) hosted our first hackathon - def hacks(): It was a tremendous success. Fifty students of all experience levels, a bunch of great mentors and judges - added all together and it was a terrific day. I wrote about it here. We're doing it again. We love last years hosts SumAll and are grateful that they continue to host our Saturday Hacking Sessions but we are also grateful to Facebook NY for allowing us to use their larger space for this edition of def hacks().

No Edu-Rant today nor a clever lesson plan. I just thought I'd share an email exchange that cracked me up. We're out in Ann Arbor visiting our son Natan who is in his first year at Michigan. Devorah sent an email asking where we should meet. It turns out that Natan's last class of the day is Music Composition. Here's what followed: Natan: Composition is in the bell tower on Central.

The StuyCS Family mailing list was host to an interesting discussion today. One of our younger members asked if the practice of giving technical problems during an interview was going to follow him throughout his career or if it goes away for more senior applicants. An interesting discussion followed. It reminded me of a time I was talking to a few senior engineers at a large tech company. A couple of younger engineers were with us along with a new hire.