In spite of the Java based annoyances I mentioned last time, I decided to go ahead and do Radix sort with my AP students. I usually don’t cover it in AP Computer Science, but I like getting the kids to think about using arrays as buckets as it’s a new way of thinking for them and it does give a non-trivial application that combines ararys and ArrayLists. It’s a nice little algorithm.

Java’s never been my favorite language either for using or for teaching. As a programmer, after starting with languages like Fortran and Pascal, I really cut my teeth with C. More recently, Python has been my go to language to get real work done. From a teaching point of view most languages have good points and bad ones. When the AP class went from Pascal to C++ I lamented losing the simplicity and the low cost of entry.

Last week in my AP classes, we were working on inheritance. So, what to do? Last time around I had my classes work on a “speed dating” program - StuyDater. Back then JonAlf had his classes work on Stuyablo, that classic dungeon crawl. I still plan on reworking the StuyDater project, but first I decided to do my take on Stuyablo. Of course, we’ve improved on it. This time it’s Stuyablo II.

Last week was crazy. Busy, stressful, late night after late night. It ended, though, on a great note. A young lady in my intro class found me in my office near the end of the day: Student: Mr. Z, I wanted to make sure to catch you before vacation! Me: What’s up? Student: I wanted to tell you that today’s lesson was AWESOME!!!!!! Wow. I’ve been teaching 23 years and that’s never happened before!

I've always lamented the fact that we don't have the time or structure to really teach our kids to program. In their early classes, they learn syntax, algorithms, and  some ways of storing data and while they  will probably work on some larger projects as they study CS, kids seem to be mostly left on their own in terms of how to take a project from problem or idea to completion.

Ok, it's a word search. We're always looking for interesting applications to build lessons around. Over the years, I've tried different things when teaching 2 dimensional arrays. Simple game boards, representing a crossword puzzle, tables of various sorts, etc. This year, JonAlf, one of my amazingly talented colleagues, decided to go with building a word search. I decided to steal the idea. It's a great one. I thought I'd use this post to go through the project and why I like it.