While my last post was well received, I did have a few conversations where people asked why I did this with such a seemingly minor ethical issue. They wondered that with issues the Facebook algorithm, bail and sentencing algorithms, gerrymandering and other issues dominating the ethical conversation, why focus this topic around something that seems to affect far fewer people and might not even be such a big deal. After all, when it does come up, flight crews can probably ask a few people to shuffle seats and voila, problem solved.

I've held off on sharing any details on my Ethics in CS class because I wanted to wait until some of it ran. I didn't want to talk about a topic and then find out that after we covered it I was all wrong. Now that we're well into the semester, I think it's time to share a few things. One of my premises when I designed the course was that most ethics courses are taken by either people who already have religion or people who see it as the "easy course" without programming.

I haven't been blogging much this year. Not sure why - probably pandemic fatigue. It's also affected my blog reading - more scanning, less deep reading. I've also been trying to spend mode time off screen learning how to paint (with,let's say mixed results :-) ) leaving less time and energy to blog. Hopefully I'll pick up on both ends as more people get vaccinated and we can get to a more normal life.

Yesterday I read three posts on teaching recursion. First by Shriram Krishnamurthi discussing his thoughts on how recursion is taught incorrectly. This prompted Adam Michlin to write about teaching recursion later with some commentary on APCS and then finally, Alfred Thompson added his thoughts. Much like everything else in education there is no single right way to do things. To say as an absolute that you should or shouldn't teach in a certain way is wrong - too many variable.

At this point, we've done a fair amount of playing with text so it's time for a fun little project. We're going to generate some text "in the style" of a source text. The technique we're going to use is usually called a Markov Chain text generator. Basically a model where the next state or word is based entirely on the current state. I don't dwell on the math under the hood but in case you're interested, here are a few links: Wikipedia, Explained Visually, UC Davis Math.

Following up on a previous post, we're going to continue to talk about playing with text. This time, building and working with a bag of words from a text. A bag of words is a simple language processing model where you just consider individual words in a text. What they are and how many times they occur. This is a pretty simple model but you can still have a good bit of fun with your students with it.

Last semester I wrote about how I was introducing my students to code review. I thought it worked pretty well and was anxious to try it again. Well, I did the lesson(s) again this past week and it looks like it's a keeper. The setup was pretty much the same with some hiccups due to using a new platform. Last semester I used plain GitHub public repos. This time, I've been using GitHub classroom which I like very much but I forgot that I made this assignment use private repos which turned out to be a hassle.

So many programming assignments involve a direct solution. Write a program to do this or write a problem to solve that. It's pretty typical. There's nothing wrong with assignments like these. They allow students to practice what they've been learning and it gives them the opportunity to create some cool programs. All the same, I like it when there's an indirect problem. You're faced with a problem but in order to solve it you first have to solve some other problem

Sometimes professional practices don't work well in the classroom and sometimes they do. One professional practice that does work well is code review - reading and reflecting on other peoples code. I've had my students do code reviews in the past but this time I did things differently. Here's what I did and here's how it went Two weeks ago my students completed a lab. The lab involved reading in a poorly indented C++ program and spit out a properly indented one.

Parts 1 and 2 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 In the first two parts of this set of posts I wrote about the motivation and design a question answering system that can answer "who" queries like "who played Spiderman" or "who shot John Lennon?" It's not perfect. When doing the Spiderman query, chances are the desired answer will be at or near the top of the list of most frequently appearing names but so will "Peter Parker.