Who is this man? I showed this to Devorah last night and she immediately said "Hey, that's the metal filing guy!!!" Yes, you got it -- Wooly Willy!!! Everybody's favorite party toy. Why did this come up? Well, yesterday, Rick put this together at work. So much for any productivity after that. It's amazing all the time sinks you can throw together with just a few lines of code and NetLogo.

During my first few years teaching computer science, I frequently felt isolated. As pretty much the only CS guy I really didn't have any one to "talk shop" with. It's hard to bounce pedagogical ideas off of your colleagues when they teach subjects that are tangentially related, at best. I now consider myself extremely fortunate that I have four terrific friends and colleagues teaching CS with me. Now we have the same advantage that other teachers have enjoyed for years.

First day back after a break is always hard. By the last day of vacation, I'm actually sleeping a little later and shifting the body clock back is rather harsh. It's tough enough getting started again, but it's even worse when you're thrown a curve ball. I got in at my usual 7:00, made my coffee, and started getting my lessons ready for the day. At about 7:30 we lost power in half of the room.

For the winter break, I assigned this set of A exam questions (actually, just the three that don't deal with the case study) to my AP classes. I wanted to assign something that wasn't particularly heavy but I didn't want my students to forget everything over break. As with most AP exam questions, they're long, wordy, and somewhat brain dead. They take a long time to read, but they frequently take you step by step through what they want you to do.

Over the past twenty years or so, I've mulled, discussed, and argued various aspects of education, computer science, and of course computer science education with friends, students, and colleagues. This past summer, I had the privilege to get to meet and briefly work with comp sci educators from around the country and started to thing that there were other like minded people, but we didn't have a forum with which to communicate.

title: "Code.org and the College Board - what's the catch and is it a cash cow?" date: "2015-05-19" tags: - policy #+END_COMMENT Big announcement the other day. Code.org will be partnering with the College Board. They'll help school's adopt their CS courses and provide funding for Code.org's professional development. You can read about it on Code.org's blog here and a USA Today article here. Already it's made it's rounds with Alfred Thompson giving his take on his blog over here.

— title: "Blogging with Emacs, Jekyll and Nikola" date: 2016-04-17 tags: mathjax emacs tools draft: false — Switched over from Jekyll to Nikola yesterday. One of the primary reasons was that I got fed up with managing a Ruby development environment across all my machines. In spite of my rantings, I'm sure Ruby and Ruby installs are fine - it's just something that I'd have to deal with on a recurring basis for one specific task - other than for Jekyll blogging, I don't use Ruby.

— title: "Remember, school is all about profit, wait no, I mean testing, no, I mean…" date: 2016-05-06 tags: policy draft: false — It's important to remember, the college board is about making money for the college board. It's not about supporting teachers and it's certainly not about educating kids. Kids took the AP Computer Science A exam last week and the College Board just released the free response questions. There seems to me more chatter about them in social media than in past years.