Last Thursday, I was back at Stuy. I was there along with members of the Alumni Association to host Stuy's first tech meetup of the season. I guess that's the first "official" project I'm working on since retirement. In the past, there had been various issues with Stuy's assorted alumni associations (yes, there were at one time three competing entities) but for the past few years they've been under what we can call "new management" - people I both like and trust so I'm happy to be working with them.

It's our third day in Charleston and we're stuck in our hotel. Stormy rains and strong winds and a coastal flood alert telling everyone to stay home. Our car is in the parking lot with water halfway up the wheels. We had tickets to go to the International African American Museum this morning but got an email saying they won't be open until the afternoon and that our tickets would automatically be refunded.

There's been discussion recently about current CS student's knowledge, or lack thereof of hardware. The discussion was spurred when this article made it's round in the CS Ed communities. My friend and fellow CS Ed Blogger Alfred Thompson gave his take on his blog. I thought I'd share mine here. First, let's get some definitions straight. The original article wasn't really talking about hardware. The author was really talking about what I'd call "low level" computer and programming concepts.

A big part of the CS4All movement has been making computer science available at all grade levels. Of course that can mean many things. Grade levels could be elementary, middle, and high school or it can me k-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12 or maybe even every grade. Does it mean required at every level or just an option? This has led to many discussions and, at least from the ones I've listened in on, the prevailing feeling from the CS side is all CS all the time.

Yesterday was the last day on our first course for teacher certification. A programming course similar to a college CS1 - think APCS-A. We're now moving to a data structures course. There are a few reasons for this. First, it's depth of knowledge. The most advanced class a high school student will normally take would be APCS-A. Data structures is the next course. A teacher should have studied a topic to a greater depth than the students.

Last Friday concluded the summer portion of Hunter's CS Teacher Certification program. It was an intense month. All day every day from June 28th through July 30. On the one hand between burnout and covid fatigue it was a tough month and I'm dealing with some much needed recovery this week. On the other hand, working with JonAlf, Topher, new team member Genady along with around 25 amazing teachers and teacher candidates made it a highlight of the year.

There's been a lot of chatter recently about the first programming language to teach. First, I read a Facebook thread focussing on Java, C and C++ and then, presumably unrelated, Mark Guzdial posted this which lead to another Facebook discussing and then yesterday I noticed a Twitter thread started by someone in the Bootcamp world asking people what their first language was which resulted in answers ranging from JS to PHP to Perl to a bunch of others.

A common refrain against requiring CS in our K12 schools is that we don't have the teachers and we won't any time soon. Sure, we don't right now but we won't if we don't do something about it. The question to ask is "how long will it take" and "how do we get there?" Let's look at New York City. We've got approximately 1,000,000 students in our public schools. Let's say that's grades 1 to 12.

Episode 2 of the CS Ed podcast had Dan Garcia talk about exam creation. This wasn't a podcast about the value of exams - in class, high stakes or otherwise. In fact Dan says in the podcast it would be great to "get grades out of the equation. Grades are gonna be an impediment to learning." But recognizes that we have not say in this most of the time (and I'll add that though I agree grades can and do perform a function) so we should be creative in terms of assessment.

I saw a couple of posts the other day about the CS Ed Podcast. Kristin Stephens-Martinez of Duke interviewed (or will interview) six CS educators on a variety of topics. There are four posted so far: David Malan Dan Garcia Amy Ko Mark Guzdial Before I started I thought I'd listen to a few and then share some thoughts but I found so much to unpack in the second episode where Dan talks about testing that I decided to share my thoughts on the first episode, then Dan's and then see if find anything to comment on in episodes three and beyond.