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.

A couple of weeks ago I was catching up with Cai - one of my many former students now living in the Bay Area. Cai was back in NY to spend time in his company Ironclad's NY office. It was great to catch up. We went over to a local restaurant and I heard a "hey Z!!" from behind me. It was Rodda, younger member of the family. He mentioned that he was at Ramp along with a bunch of other StuyCS folk and that I came up in conversation the other day.

So, last post I talked about the technical interview and unquestionably students at elite private schools have yet another leg up on the other folk. Today, let's look at the core subject of those interviews and what I think should be emphasized in class. I want to be clear - I'm only talking about in class here. There are many things that can be done at public institutions like Hunter to help better prepare students for tech careers.

I haven't been blogging much this year. Not sure why - probably pandemic fatigue. It's also affected my blog reading - more scanning, less deep reading. I've also been trying to spend mode time off screen learning how to paint (with,let's say mixed results :-) ) leaving less time and energy to blog. Hopefully I'll pick up on both ends as more people get vaccinated and we can get to a more normal life.

Yesterday I read three posts on teaching recursion. First by Shriram Krishnamurthi discussing his thoughts on how recursion is taught incorrectly. This prompted Adam Michlin to write about teaching recursion later with some commentary on APCS and then finally, Alfred Thompson added his thoughts. Much like everything else in education there is no single right way to do things. To say as an absolute that you should or shouldn't teach in a certain way is wrong - too many variable.

It's been 10 days from my last post. Not really a big break for me historically but certainly a big one given how much I've been posting this year. Been under the weather for the past couple of weeks dealing with COVID-19. Haven't had super bad symptoms and as symptoms have been getting fewer and less severe I'm hoping I'm close to a full recovery. In any event, I'm feeling good enough for a quick post.

I organize a monthly professional development session for CS teachers. It's targeted at teachers who are beyond the beginner stage and don't want yet another hello world blinky arduino scratch workshop. Don't get me wrong, given the need for CS teachers we need plenty of beginner workshops but we also need to take teachers to the next level. I refer to my workshops as being for teachers of APCS-A, similar, or beyond.

One of my pet annoyances is how code ecosystems have gotten more and more complex. Sometimes I think tool designers put together build systems to show how clever they are rather than to solve dependency problems as cleanly and simply as possible. Over the break I wrote GitHub Org Explorer - a tool to help deal with GitHub classroom repositories. It worked but was using "basic" authentication where it sent a username and password with every request.

Yesterday we had another Professional Development Workshop for High School CS Teachers and as usual, I wnat to express my thanks to Digital Ocean for continuing to provide space, food, and great overall support. This time though, instead of JonAlf and I having to run the show we had a guest speaker. We were joined by Sarah Judd of AI4ALL. Sarah gave an overview of what AI4ALL was up to and why but the core of her presentation was taking us through some of the exercises they have been developing at AI4All.

People say that one of the impossible problems for CS teachers is keeping current - they say the field is constantly changing, how can a teacher keep up with all the new things going on. Well, on the one hand it isn't true - most of the core of CS is the same. We still teach roughly the same programming constructs, data structures and algorithms. On the other hand, it is true.