Yesterday we held our third monthly Professional Development session for teachers of "APCS-A, Similar, and Beyond." It's great to see that we're starting to form a core of a community of CS teachers teaching some of the more advanced classes as there is a core group that keeps coming back for more. Even better is the fact that we're gaining a couple of new teachers at each session.

Last time, we were at Digital Ocean, a cloud provide that has been very involved in education since their creation and has been a tremendous boon to my education projects over the years.

This time we were hosted at Grow with Google's new New York City space. It's a great space on the first two floors of Google's main building in Chelsea - 111 8th avenue. GWG looks like it will be a terrific resource for New Yorkers with workshops ranging from coding, resume writing, digital skills, and more. They also have offerings for both kids and adults.

They were also great hosts, providing a great room for us to run our session as well as a nice dinner to keep the teachers fueled.

As usual, we had two major themes for our PD. First the pedagogy. My former colleage Topher started with a pair programming workshop.

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Pair programming is a pretty common technique but it's deceptively difficult to do well. It's not as simple as "work in groups of two" and it can be a challenge to make sure both students are engaged and progressing while using this practice.

Topher ran the group through a pair programming exercise and led a discussion as to some of the strategies he uses and some of the challenges he's face. I found it very helpful. Even small suggestions like when he has each pair draw their "team flag" on a piece of paper which they'll hold up if they want to ask for help. In the discussion after the workshop I mentioned that I've had more success with pair programming when I relate it to a series of code review lessons I've been doing and that if people were interested I'd talk about those lessons at a future session.

Then we had dinner after which I did the content piece.

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We first look at a bit of NetLogo for image procesing mostly so I could introduce the participants to NetLogo since it's really an underused, underappreciated environment. Then we talked a bit about the APCS-A image lab. This led to the meat of the content piece. We took a look at this video on seam carving. When I first saw it, I was blown away. Now it's an old technique but I'm still blown away by how it can be used as both motivation and a a platform to teach some dynamic programming. We then did a brief overview behind the basic ideas of dynamic programming and then developed the dynamic programming algorith that's used in Seam Carving. I'll probably write all of this up in more detail in a future post.

Overall it was a great event. We have one more PD scheduled for May and then we'll start it up again in the Fall.

It's great to have amazing partners like Google and Digital Ocean to help support our CS teachers and I'm looking forward to work with both of them for years to come.