Although retired, I'm trying to keep some skin in the game. An opportunity to do that came up back in mid march when my friend Aankit Patel reached out to me. I've known Aankit since he ran CSforAll for the NYC Department of Education but now he's the University Dean for Tech and Computer and Info Sciences at CUNY. Aankit told me he had some extra funds to run an event and asked if I wanted to organize and run a hackathon for CUNY students.

This article made its rounds this past week. It cites a couple of papers claiming that CS teachers are delivering better instruction and might be better qualified than teachers in other subject areas. This is in spite of the fact that CS teachers generally have a generally weak background in CS as well as in CS related pedagogy compared to teachers of other more well established subjects. The papers forming the basis for the article were written by Paul Bruno a professor of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership

How many different intro CS courses should we have? A question that resurfaces periodically. This time due to an article in which C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup posits that different audiences would benefit from a different intro treatment for CS. Perennial CS Blogger and friend Alfred Thompson shared his thoughts on the subject here. The thought is that someone who's going into academic CS needs one thing, a software engineer another, a non CS person who could benefit from some programming within their field something else.