It's that time of year again. Yep, you got it. Time for Advent of Code. I'm not feeling nearly as motivated as in past years but so far so good. Finished the first three days. Today I got a good reminder - work through your examples. You can find today's problem here. For part 1 you got a list of binary numbers and had to figure out how many ones and zeros there were in any given digit.

Like most CS educators I'm a regular reader of Alfred Thompson's blog. Alfred's latest post is spot on but there was a line in it and a particular Twitter response that reminded me that we so often forget a big reason why people learn to code. Alfred mentions, as did that Tweet about coding to solve problems. What problem are you trying to solve. This is the mainstream push - programming helps you solve problems.

With summer right around the corner I'm hoping to spend at least a little time on some personal coding projects. There are a few work related tools I'd love to develop and just some random areas of CS I'd like to explore. If I finish them, the work projects will be web based. I was thinking about using this as an opportunity to do a deeper dive into Clojure having used it for some experiments and competitions like Advent of Code but at the end of the day I decided not to.

What can I do to discourage my students from using the "break" statement? That was more or less the gist of the comment and it elicited some good responses. This time the conversation was on Facebook but I've seen this one and participated in it many times before. I never liked the question when presented as a "how can I stop them" one. I equally dislike when the offered advice is basically "never use break no matter what" or something similar.

Never use global variables Never break out of a loop These are two "best practices" that are frequently touted in early CS classes both at the high school and college level. They came up a couple of times yesterday. Once in the Facebook APCS-A teachers group and once on Alfred Thompson's blog. Alfred post was topically on global variables. Actually it was deeper than just global variables. It's also about how students progress - what they can figure out at various stages of progress and how what seems like a good idea early on the path to computer science doesn't seem so great later on.