When kids are knee deep in nlog(n) algorithms and working on recursion, it's easy to lose track of the amazingly neat things that are right around the corner for them. I've recently been working on organizing our Stuyvesant Computer Science alumni network and am putting together a page with some of the places our graduates work here. It can be hard to see how one goes from sorting and searching in Java to working at places like Google, or FourSqurare or creating your own startup like DigitalOcean, Usable Health, TimeHop, or PropHop.

So today we changed things up a bit. Instead of having a typical lab type periods, we tried the Pair Programming Tag Team Shootout. We aren't annualized so while the kids that have been with me since September have been working in pairs for a while, the other half of the class is just getting used to how we do it. I also wanted to get the kids to mix a little more.

Piloting a new course this semester - Intro to Computer Science part 2. Between the existing Intro part 1 and this, we should be able to do a pretty thorough job in preparing our kids for the future. We decided that we wanted the kids to make deliverables in the form of web pages - plain old html written by hand. Part of the idea was to demystify things, part was to let the kids show off their work, part was to have something that they can generate programatically as the course progressed, and part was to give them a tool they might find valuable beyond their computer science classes.

I've been mostly underwater for the last couple of weeks. End of term issues combined with the Academy of Software Engineering announcement has pretty much eaten up all of my out of class time. It's going to be a week or so before I can finish writing the posts I was planning on, but it looks like a storm is brewing around Stuyvesant and Computer Science so I thought I'd put up this short semi-related post.

Fred Wilson and me at #SOTC2012Last week I was given the honor of attending the State of the City address. The mayor was announcing a new school for the fall. An Academy for Software Engineering. This has been in the works for a while and has a long way to go but the announcement was a major step. The project really got its start a couple of years ago.

I've always lamented the fact that we don't have the time or structure to really teach our kids to program. In their early classes, they learn syntax, algorithms, and  some ways of storing data and while they  will probably work on some larger projects as they study CS, kids seem to be mostly left on their own in terms of how to take a project from problem or idea to completion.

Now that the ML and AI courses are at an end, here are some of the things I would do moving forward. Both courses already have a basic track where students just watch the lectures and do the in lecture quizzes and an advanced track where students also complete weekly assignments. I think we can be certain that there were students who just watched a few lectures, many who completed every assignment, and those who fell at all points in between.

This is the first in a three part series. Part 1 talks about my take on how the courses were presented. in Part 2, I'll discuss my take on how to improve the experience and finally, in part 3, we'll look at on line education with an emphasis on the high school market. As some of you know, I've been taking the on line Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence courses offered by Stanford this semester.

Ok, it's a word search. We're always looking for interesting applications to build lessons around. Over the years, I've tried different things when teaching 2 dimensional arrays. Simple game boards, representing a crossword puzzle, tables of various sorts, etc. This year, JonAlf, one of my amazingly talented colleagues, decided to go with building a word search. I decided to steal the idea. It's a great one. I thought I'd use this post to go through the project and why I like it.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the K-12 workshop at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference. It was great to reconnect with some old friends, make some new ones, and talk shop for the weekend. One result was that I promised to start blogging again. I've got a number of ideas for posts lined up. Some on pedagogy, some technical, and some cultural. Hope you enjoy them.