On to Friday's "Computing and Liberal Arts" session. A couple to write about here. One will bring us back to Harvard's CS50 - I'll save that for tomorrow. Today I'll share what Lisa Zhang and her team at the University of Toronto at Mississauga are doing to bring writing into their CS classes. Most people I speak to agree that in America we don't do a good job teaching writing.

The next good idea was from David Malan of Harvard's CS50 class. For full disclosure, I have to say that I've been skeptical of CS50 ever since I started hearing from my former students. I've had a lot of them either take CS50 at Harvard, TA the class, or TA the course that follows CS50 and their assessment is, let's say somewhat different than the usual Ted Talk miracle course hype that normally surrounds it.

The first "good idea at the time" dealt with deadline extensions. The scenario in question was presented by my long time friend Lauren Bricker of the University of Washington although a very similar situation was also presented by of Kristin Stephens-Martinez of Duke. Lauren was one of the few High School teachers with a strong background in CS so she's really a unicorn and it made sense for UW to come calling and snatch her up.

My new favorite session at SIGSCE is "It seemed like a good idea at the time." Panelists share something they tried in or with their classes that they thought would be awesome. It wasn't. then they shared either how they tried to fix it or left it open ended. It's a lot of fun and for the two years I've attended the most interesting and valuable session. I wish though, that there was a presenter that shared something about a specific lesson and how that failed - most if not all of the talks I've been to in this session were always a little tangential to the actual class content.

On top of what I posted yesterday, it looks like I'll add something on Nifty Assignments but as I'm winding down in my Toronto Hotel waiting for tomorrow morning's flight home, I thought I'd share some general thoughts on the conference. Numbers and perceptions. The announced attendance was around 1500 but that was both in person and remote. It would be interesting to know what the in person numbers were but I'd estimate it was under 1000.

Long day two at SIGCSE lots of interesting stuff. Don't have the time or energy to write anything up so I thought I'd share a list of topics that I plan to write up in the next few days or weeks. After day 1's keynote and the session on the ACM's 2023 curriculum I went to "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time" which is my new favorite session replacing "Nifty Assignments.

Arrived in Toronto yesterday for SIGCSE 2023 along with Devorah and Batya. Devorah to play tourist and Batya as conference attendee. As usual, I arrived early the day before to get my bearings. Since we weren't partaking in any of the preconference activities we had an afternoon to explore the city. Ten miles walking from the hotel near the CN Tower, through and all around Kensington, looping through the University of Toronto campus and back.

While my series on APCS-A language choice is done, I wanted to write this brief addendum. While reading comments over on Facebook under my APCS posts one caught my eye. There was a comment saying they wished the College Board would create a data science course. I responded, why not create one yourself. The response, shared I'm sure by many is that if a course doesn't have an AP designation students won't sign up for it.

I think I've hit on the big points on APCS-A language but a couple more remain. This time, let's look at alternative languages. When APCS started in 1984, Pascal probably made sense - it was the primary learning language at the time. It wasn't really used in industry but it was the language you cut your teeth on. A few years later when I went from college to Goldman Sacks I found very few companies using Pascal.

One of the arguments for keeping APCS-A as is are the costs to change. There are of course, many kinds of costs. The first are the monetary costs. New text book, curricular materials and possibly equipment. The College Board has their development costs but I don't care about those - they're raking in money hand over fist anyway. I don't think these costs amount to much. Companies that sell materials for classes are always trying to make sales and even when subjects don't change there are always new books and other resources.