When we last left our heroes we had made the API call to dictionaryapi.com, gotten the response and coverted the json string into elisp data. Specifically an array that contained a hash table. Today's video will take us the rest of the way to our thesaurus mode - run the function and we'll get a list of synonyms for the word we're currently at. First, we had to pull out the synonyms from the response.

When I was a kid, CS in K12 wasn't a thing. Personal Computers were just becoming available. I remember pilgrimages to the basement Polk Hobby shop to play. I don't even remember what those computers were but soon, names like Apple, TRS-80 and Commodore PET were appearing. Throughout my schooling, CS wasn't a thing until High School and even there it was a couple of random classes because somehow Stuyvesant had an IBM-1130 - a punch card driven machine and a couple of math teachers taught simple programming electives.

Sorry for the long break. Once December started, I spent the first few weeks spending my coding time on Advent of Code, then just got sidetracked but now it's time to get going again. This is the last elisp topic I specifically wanted to cover so this and the next video mmight be the end of this series, we'll see. What are we doing today? Using a web API. Basically, if we want to use some external data source or facility a typical way to make that happen is through a web API.

Listened to the latest episode of the CS Ed Podcast yesterday. It featured Colleen Lewis, of CS Teaching Tips fame talking about how she uses manipulatives. Much like Colleens session last SIGCSE on microteaching this episode made me both happy and sad. Happy because it's awesome that Colleen is bringing attention to strong classroom teaching practices and she's sharing good stuff. Sad because these are things rarely talked about in teaching CS or college level teaching in general.

Time to kick off 2024. I closed out 2023 the way I usually do - going to bed early but I didn't start 2024 with a run like last year. I'm still nursing a broken toe and it'll be a couple more weeks before I'm cleared for full activity. I won't make any predictions on what's to come in CS Education in 2024 but I thought I'd share a few things I'd be looking at.

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.

Haven't written up the last few days but I thought today's Advent of Code problem was worth a few words. I might still go back and write up a few other ones, and who knows if I'll finish any more problems - Is stopped around here last year. We'll see. I liked today's challenge because it was a nice introduction to hash tables. Specifically, to solve the problem, you implement a simple open hash table.

I wanted to add a bit to yesterday's post. Yesterday I wrote that for part 2 I just counted the cycles from each starting point. If you looked at my code you'd notice that I didn't actually do that. If you recall, nodes were identified by 3 letter codes. All nodes that end in an A like AAA or BBA are start nodes and all nodes that end in a Z are end nodes and we had to find the step, when starting simultaneously at all start nodes, that they all get to end nodes.

Today's puzzle was just what I needed this morning. Made me think, but not too much :-). You can find the problem here. Part 1 was pretty straightforward. You had a set of locations and for each location you could go left or right. So, for example, if node AAA is defined as AAA = (BBB,CCC) then, if your next instruction was L or left, you'd go to BBB, if it was R, then CCC.

I haven't and probably won't write up problems 2 through 5 and to be honest, don't know how many days I'll go on solving this year. I thought that today's problem was interesting enough for a write up so if you're interested, keep reading. Here's a link to the problem: https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/6 And my solution(s) are here. What I liked about today's problem is that there are various, let's say levels to the solution(s).