Now that the semester's over I've had a chance to reflect a bit on my teaching over the past year. This year I taught two classes each semester so the load was a little higher. First semester was one class of our CS0 and one of the lab/enrichment component that goes with CS1. Nothing big to report there as I've done them both before. The biggest difference was that I had to deal with two separate classes even though they're one cohort.

Someone mentioned Grokking Algorithms by Aditya Y. Bhargava in one of the CS educator Facbeook groups. It looked interesting so I thought I'd give it a once over. It's certainly an accessible book. Text mixed with cute line drawings, "hand written" text, diagrams and picture.s It reminded me of one of my favorite, most accessible Calculus books Who Was Fourier. Overall I enjoyed the book but I'm not sure what its best audience is.

Reading Garth Flint's end of year post and Alfred Thompson's follow up had me thinking about a couple of things. One was spurred when Garth wrote "They also have to figure out the math before they code." This made me think about all the details we sometimes take for for granted. Things that are hard for our students that we just know. It's frequently math that we might find trivial but it could also be much simpler things.

Just like last year, I'm taking in two classes worth of students in to my honors program. The challenge is that I can only teach two classes and I've got to figure out what to teach and then which students belong in which class. It basically comes down to one of two courses, our CS0 (CSCI127) and our CS1 (CSCI135). CSCI127 is a first programming experience. The normal class is taught as a large lecture with small recitation/labs.

Now that high school seniors have all committed to their respective colleges I though I'd share some information on Hunter's incoming Daedalus (honors CS) cohort. I joke about the first cohort saying that nobody applied to the program. That's kind of true. I jointed Hunter a little over three years ago in late January. That was after high school seniors had already applied to college and at that time the program didn't exist.