Our hackers have been coming down to SumAll every Saturday for a while now. It’s a great space and we’ve been given run of the office. That said, the hackers really had no idea what SumAll is all about. Today, we had our first guest speaker. Davin Chew, founder and CTO of SumAll. Davin’s also a member of the StuyCS family, he was my student back in the nineties. When Davin heard we needed space for our Saturday program, he and the SumAll team graciously offered to host.

This past Monday I, like may woke to hear about the passing of Pete Seeger. Ten days earlier we were up at Symphony Space for the “Woody’s Children” 45th Anniversary Concert. Pete was supposed to perform but was ill. At 94 years of age, I wondered if the end was near. I was at the concert with my family as well as with my buddy Ben. Fitting since Ben and I grew up on Pete’s music while many of our peers did not.

Last time, I shared my thoughts on the recent coverage of AP CS statistics. Compiled and presented by Barbara Ericson and later reported on all over the place. To summarize my point of view - yes there is a problem but some of the highlighted data points can easily be shown to be irrelevant and therefore can hurt the greater goal of access to great CS education for all.

Some buzz seems to have circulated on the data compiled by Barbara Ericson on AP Computer Science test takers in 2013. In addition to going to the source there was a piece in The Atlantic and in Education Week. Some exciting results: In two states just as many girls passed the AP CS exam as guys!!!!! In two other states, just 6 more guys passed than girls!!!!! In yet another state, 100% of the girls passed, doing far better than the approximately 75% of the boys that passed!

I’ve written before about That One Inspirational Curriculum - the idea that it’s not the topic in the syllabus but rather what the teacher does with it. Some times a simple problem can lead to some really neat concepts. Take what we did in my AP classes over the past couple of days. I wanted a nice little warm up after the break so we wrote a simple rotation cipher. We started with a little encode routine - take a string and rotate the letters by some offset.

Back to school last Thursday after almost two week off. Twenty four hours later - Snow Day. I know this sounds a bit hokey, but I really would have rather had school. I love a good snow day as much as the next guy, but after a big vacation, I was really ready to get back to work with the kids. Saturday, hacking sessions were set to resume. Being in Manhattan, getting around was pretty easy but we’ve got hackers from all over the city from Staten Island to the Bronx.

I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. If I’m working on something specific, I might set a goal to finish it, but the idea of goals for a year never struck a chord with me. It’s one of the things that I find absurd about the current teacher rating system - I have to decided on my three goals for the year. I always have one goal with respect to my profession - to be better at it.

We’re practically at the close of 2013 and it’s high time I wished everyone wonderful things for the year to come. It’s also time for a new look to this blog. Why the rewrite? Partly because I was tired of the look, but mostly because, when I put it together, it was the first time I used that toolset and was just figuring things out. I’m still no expert, but I thought it was time to clean things up.

In spite of the Java based annoyances I mentioned last time, I decided to go ahead and do Radix sort with my AP students. I usually don’t cover it in AP Computer Science, but I like getting the kids to think about using arrays as buckets as it’s a new way of thinking for them and it does give a non-trivial application that combines ararys and ArrayLists. It’s a nice little algorithm.

Java’s never been my favorite language either for using or for teaching. As a programmer, after starting with languages like Fortran and Pascal, I really cut my teeth with C. More recently, Python has been my go to language to get real work done. From a teaching point of view most languages have good points and bad ones. When the AP class went from Pascal to C++ I lamented losing the simplicity and the low cost of entry.