There was a discussion to day on a the Facebook CS Educators group about project based learning. This was initiated based on the College Board's desire to more more project work in some classes including APCS-A. Most, actually I think all of the educators on the forum agreed that students creating projects are a good idea but the bone of contention was over real world projects vs what I'll call practice projects.

Earlier today, I saw a linkedin post by Code.org's Pat Yongpradit summarizing a series of articles on AI in K12 classrooms in Ed Week. I couldn't get far into the articles due to paywall restrictions but Pat's summary and the ensuing comments and discussion let me to writing this. One thing that stuck out in the comments, and this has been a recurring theme in AI in K12 classroom discussions is that a teacher who allows students to use AI, teaches AI, etc.

I read this morning that David Bouley has passed away at age 70. Bouley was an influential chef in New York city. A huge influence on the fine dining scene that has developed in the last few decades. Why am I, a retired computer science teacher writing about a decorated chef? As fate had it, there are some connections between David Bouley and Stuyvesant High School, specifically the new building, where I spent most of my career.

One of the things I want to do now that I have some time is get my head around all the modern AI stuff. I'm starting with a review or things I've already done by going through Andrew Ng's Coursera ML class. I'll probably continue with his courses but I'm certainly open to any suggestions (specifically for a CS guy who's not so strong on the math side). This means diving back into Python even though Clojure is usually my weapon of choice.

Went back to school yesterday. Specifically, I was back at Stuy running an AI panel discussion for the Stuy HS Alumni Association. I figured it's time for me to get back in the CS / CS Ed game. Plans started a few months ago when a member of my Stuy CS family who's also in the SHSAA board asked about doing something. I was game but a little apprehensive, mostly because there have been, let's say, issues with the way the SHSAA had operated in the past.

A teacher in one of the CSEd forums I'm part of asked for thoughts on what low level language to teach. She also asked about scripting but I'm not going address that here. The question came, aparently due to state guidelines which were somewhat vague. I couldn't find the specific guidelines but I did find old guidelines that indicated that the course in question was intended to be post APCS-A.

This morning, I read Arthur Goldstein's latest blog post. Arthur, is a relatively recently retired NYC public school teacher, a UFT (United Federation of Teachers) chapter leader, and a frequent critic of Michael Mulgrew, the current and long term UFT president. I'm a union guy through and through but I also, like Arthur, believe that UFT's leadership is neither pro-teacher nor pro-student but rather pro-themselves. It's a rather sad state of affairs.

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.