I'll recount what I said a couple of posts earlier - I was speaking to a HS teacher who I've known for a long time but was meeting in person for the first time. It was his first SIGCSE. I asked how he was liking it. His response was "well, there are a whole lot of professors who really could use a class or two in pedagogy."

I'll go further to say that we always give extra value and credence to those that come from elite institutions. It's just a reflection on society - famous people are considered authorities and frequently assert themselves as such. What does Bill Gates know about education? Nothing, yet he's done more to drive education policies in America than any ten teachers. David Coleman controls education through the college board and "gifted" us with common core and how many years did he teach? What about Wendy Kopp of Teach For America.

But I digress.

If something comes out of an elite institution it's good. Otherwise, people are skeptical. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a student complain about something at Hunter, another CUNY, or a similar institution but when I've heard students talk of similar or worse from places like Stanford, Harvard, or CMU, it's always oh, those institutions know how to do things.

All this leads up to more commentary on Harvard's CS50. In this session David Malan, the course's creator and instructor was talking about innovative ways of engagement that he used during Covid. Being at Harvard, he had access to the American Repertory Theater to film as well as a professional level props department.

It must be nice to have almost limitless resources.

Malan talked about ripping a phone book to demonstrate binary search, using blocks and string for linked lists, swapping variables by modeling with two cups filled with colored liquids then three. Linear search with "let's make a deal" style doors and more.

All of these came with the expected level of glitz and showmanship.

Now, to be fair, most of the ideas presented were good ones, although I'll suggest one I find better for linked list down below. No problem with the presentation - I liked it - all good stuff. The thing that made me sad is at the college level this is considered innovative. I know teachers who were ripping phone books in the 80s. They were teaching binary search for the first time but they knew how to use manipulatives from day 1 as teachers. Same for most of the other practices.

Malan did bring up the important question as to how much time one should spend on these types of demos vs class materials and where's the line but I think a richer presentation would have included an instructor from a less well funded institution (or a HS teacher since these ideas are old hat to them) providing the dollar store value version of the Harvard production and they could have discussed if they were equally effective or not.

So, while I have my curmudgeonly take that for a K12 teacher not much here is new it is really good stuff. The paper is worth looking over and at least for now, it's freely available here.

To close things off, I wanted to talk about the linked list demo. It's a nice but medium to high effort demo. Malan made physical blocks to represent nodes and connected them with string. This could of course be done more cheaply with, let's say cardboard bankers boxes but I have another suggestion that worked better for me, although both are good ideas.

It's actually the way I introduced linked lists prior to Covid when we were in person.

Prior to class, I tell a subset of my students a secret - who's after them. In person, I'd pull them aside on entry, on Zoom I'd dm them.

I'd say:

• John, don't tell anyone but Beth is after you
• Sarah, don't tell anyone but Jean is after you
• Beth, don't tell anyone but Sarah is after you
• Jean, don't tell anyone but Harry is after you

Etc.

Now, sometime, students get worried and interpret "so and so is after you" to mean that person is out to get them. An unintended consequence, but it's always turned out to be an opportunity to have some class fun.

Anyway, this is a linked list:

John->Beth->Sarah->Jean->Harry

I make it clear that each person can only know and remember two things - who they are and who's next.

We can see that the list is distributed all over the class (or city on Zoom) and we can perform operations on the list. We try an insert and more often than not the person doing the insert does it in the wrong order - hilarity ensues.

An instructor can go in all sorts of directions with this. It's fun and actively involves the students. The demo is nice but I much prefer this.

So, that's it for today some good practices, possibly innovative at the college level but not at the HS one. Fun presentation and a paper worth reading over.

Next I'll be writing up a session called Pedagogical Innovations. It really had nothing to do with pedagogy, more about curriculum but it too was a really good session.