A number of months ago, the K12 CS Ed community was abuzz. It seems that Coding Rooms - an online collaboration and coding platform was closing their free teacher tier. I was going to write about it then but didn't get to it. Some time later, I noticed some complaints about teacher throttling. Again, meant to write but it didn't happen; The other day though, there was another disturbance in the force as teachers started commiserating about Repl.

So it seems like Copilot and similar will be beneficial to programmers but the question remains as to how beneficial. Will it be incremental change or will it be a game changer? Today we'll look at how it will affect teaching and learning CS. It seems pretty clear that one group of learners will benefit from things like copilot - people who are already strong programmers who are learning something new.

ChatGPT in education has been all the rage but there's another twist on AI that was getting some buzz even earlier - AI based code completions. GitHub's Copilot has gotten the most air time but there are others out there as well. When you code with Copilot, you type in a function name and maybe a comment above it and the AI system will fill in the function. A canonical example seems to be Mergesort.

It's always been a challenge to get students to buy in to an out of class communication tool. Over the years I've tried many including mailing lists, Piazza, Discourse, Vanilla and other discussion forums, Slack and probably a few other things. I guess it's not surprising that it's a hard sell - prior to the internet once school was out kids there as no teacher student interaction until the next school day and kids would only interact with their direct friends.

Beyond the CS specifics We've been primarily using three tools in our summer certification program. Zoom for video conferencing Slack for text based communicaiton GitHub for just about everything else We use GitHub as a CMS - a place to share code and assignments as well as collect them. We're also playing with GitHub discussions although that's fallen somewhat to the wayside with Slack being preferred. One of the choices I'm digging more than ever is GitHub Classroom for assignments.

I woke up to this tweet by Mark Guzdial today:#pro-version-or ed-version.org# An indication that CS Ed in US high schools is about vocational training: 2 (of 5) recommended sessions at the @csteachersorg conference are on Github and Agile. Is @CSforAll a Silicon Valley jobs program? https://t.co/n8ugnmTU84 — Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) May 28, 2020 This led to a lively discussion throughout the day with lots of likes and lots of comments.

As we scrambled to move online in March we used what we knew, what we heard of and what we were allowed. This usually meant Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. I settled on Zoom. It worked and worked pretty well. There were a few things I felt they could improve on but given that Zoom wasn't designed as a teaching tool I've been pretty happy with it. Now that the emergency rush has passed we have time to see if there are some better alternatives.

A while ago I wrote about a small side project - GitHub Org Explorer - a small tool to make it easier to manager GitHub repositories based on organization. I'm using it as a replacement for the GitHub provided Classroom Assistant. I find it more flexible in terms of exporting assignments to my own machine and it allows me to delete repos en masse which is critical after the semester is over.

I'm a big fan of GitHub Classroom and use it for all of my class assignments. It's great for organizing, distributing, and collecting assignments and gets the kids used to using real world tools at the same time. I've written a bunch of posts on how I use it: How I use GitHub Classroom Communicating with Students - meybe GitHub to the rescue GitHub as a tool for education (part of a 4 part series) As well as a couple of others.

Since Hunter uses C++ as it's core language, I haven't used Java much in the past three years. That's going to change pretty soon. Once we start offering our CS teacher Certificate and Masters programs I'll once again start teaching with Java as that's one of the langauges that we want to prepare our teachers with. That means deciding on a set of tools and so I've been spending time evaluating Java programming environments with an eye on the beginner since not only do the teachers I work with have to be comfortable with the tool but more importantly they will have to be able to support the tool for all of their students.