Two days ago I asked the students, in small groups, to come up with a design to store a school (or school district) database. Yesterday we discussed the designs. All the students took our brand of AP Computer Science last year - a superset of the old AB curriculum and in that class they implemented a number of data structures such as binary search trees and hash tables, but they really didn’t have an opportunity to design something more comprehensive.

So, we’re into the second year of my Software Development class. It’s a little different since last time, I taught many of the kids in AP. This time, they’re mostly new to me. In AP, everything is low level. The students build linked lists, binary search trees, heaps, hash tables, graphs and the like. It’s all about building the data structure. The Node, if you would. We’re about to start talking about databases.

So here we are starting the new year and NY City is rolling out its new teacher evaluation system. It was all over the news last year. Ultimately, the state imposed the plan. The city hailed the new plan as a way to fire under-performing teachers. The UFT president hailed the plan as something that “is designed to help teachers improve their skills….” My take? All three parties have thrown the students and teachers under the bus.

We just got back from a few days in Montreal. Love the city - it’s walkable, lots of good food, love the waterfront, history, and lots to do. I also love seeing a city using a bike/walking combo. In a car, you speed by things too fast and parking’s always a problem. Foot alone doesn’t let you cover enough ground. By bike, you’re slow enough to see things but fast enough to get from place to place.

Over the last few years, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about curriculum. “We need a curriculum that works for everyone.” “If we had a good curriculum, we could get CS in the schools.” “Can’t you just take someone else’s curriculum and scale things out?” People miss the point. In my twenty some odd years as an educator and my forty five as a human (including 18 as a parent), I’ve never heard someone talk about that one inspirational curriculum that made all the difference in their lives.

So, the Citibike program has been running for a bit. I like the idea, but I have some reservations – it’s great for getting around in the zone - I’ve been using it for short shopping trips - run cross town to Fairway or take a quick trip from work to Porto Rico Importers or Rocco’s Pastries. On the other hand, the zone doesn’t get to the residential neighborhoods of upper Manhattan or the boroughs and the price per day is way too expensive for regular working class joes, particularly on top of a subway trip.

For those of that don’t know, the New York Tech Meetup it’s one of the things that help make the New York Tech Scene so awesome. It’s a group of some 30k+ members and once a month, at Skriball Center at NYU they hold a meetup. It’s really quite an event. Members of the tech community demo their projects, there’s question and answer time, and afterwards theres a gathering for schmoozing amongst the crowd and the presenters.

People keep asking me about how we’re doing with respect to gender balance and CS education at Stuy. Rather than writing the same email again and again, I figured I’d summarize things here. We’ve done rather well at Stuy. I might write more in depth at some point in the future but we don’t dumb anything down and we aren’t patronizing. I think much of the success can be attributed to:

One week ago today was Stuyvesant's graduation. I usually know a number of seniors pretty well but, since I like to cycle through classes, every couple of years I have a group that I've been with from 10th grade to 12th. This was one of those years It was extra special because it was also my daughter Batya's graduating class. It's been an amazing gift to be able to work at her school for the past four years and she's been amazingly tolerant.

This past year, I was able to convince my administration to allow me to create a new course - Software Development. I really felt there was something missing in our kids CS preparation - missing both from Stuy’s program and from many youngsters college experiences. I plan to do a few posts on the course, it’s design, implementation, and lessons learned, but for today, let’s look at the years culminating event: