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).

It's that time again. Advent of Code 2023. A new two part programming problem each day from now through December 25th. Since 2015 I've looked forward to the event, taken part, and posted at least a few write ups here on my blog. I figured this year would be the same. Of course, it does end up putting a crunch in my routine. Usually each morning I wake up, work out, usually a run unless the weather's bad, have my coffee, do the puzzle, read blogs and other content over breakfast and then I'm ready for the rest of my day.

Today we're finishing off our emoji project. This video covers two quick things. The first is how we can make the mode use either of our replacement methods - one that actually replaces the text with the emoji and the other that uses text properties to overlay the emoji without changing the text. This is done with a variable that we can set telling us which function to call. We used one named emoji-replace-by-insert.

While perusing Reddit this morning, waiting for the stuffing to bake, I came across this post. Apparently there was a todo at Berkeley involving a CS instructor. Specifically a grad student teaching their data structures course. You can link from the first post to the Berkeley subreddit post and can listen to the video if you want. It seems that this was the last day of class and the instructor decided to end class early, announce that he was going to share some of his own views so students should feel free to leave and then proceeded to give a very one sided diatribe on the Israel/Palestine situation and to say one sided is me being nice.