Last Thursday, I was back at Stuy. I was there along with members of the Alumni Association to host Stuy's first tech meetup of the season. I guess that's the first "official" project I'm working on since retirement. In the past, there had been various issues with Stuy's assorted alumni associations (yes, there were at one time three competing entities) but for the past few years they've been under what we can call "new management" - people I both like and trust so I'm happy to be working with them.

It's our third day in Charleston and we're stuck in our hotel. Stormy rains and strong winds and a coastal flood alert telling everyone to stay home. Our car is in the parking lot with water halfway up the wheels. We had tickets to go to the International African American Museum this morning but got an email saying they won't be open until the afternoon and that our tickets would automatically be refunded.

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.

A big part of the CS4All movement has been making computer science available at all grade levels. Of course that can mean many things. Grade levels could be elementary, middle, and high school or it can me k-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12 or maybe even every grade. Does it mean required at every level or just an option? This has led to many discussions and, at least from the ones I've listened in on, the prevailing feeling from the CS side is all CS all the time.

Yesterday was the last day on our first course for teacher certification. A programming course similar to a college CS1 - think APCS-A. We're now moving to a data structures course. There are a few reasons for this. First, it's depth of knowledge. The most advanced class a high school student will normally take would be APCS-A. Data structures is the next course. A teacher should have studied a topic to a greater depth than the students.

So I'm teaching my Ethics and CS class for the first time. I originally designed the course but didn't teach it the first time around. That honor went to my friend, Master Teacher Topher Mykolyk. He of course did an amazing job - impossible to follow. Fortunately, this is a different cohort so they don't know how great Topher was for the course :-). Even though I have the syllabus and Topher's notes from last time around, first time through is very week to week but I think I'm starting to get my legs under me.

Last Friday concluded the summer portion of Hunter's CS Teacher Certification program. It was an intense month. All day every day from June 28th through July 30. On the one hand between burnout and covid fatigue it was a tough month and I'm dealing with some much needed recovery this week. On the other hand, working with JonAlf, Topher, new team member Genady along with around 25 amazing teachers and teacher candidates made it a highlight of the year.

There's been a lot of chatter recently about the first programming language to teach. First, I read a Facebook thread focussing on Java, C and C++ and then, presumably unrelated, Mark Guzdial posted this which lead to another Facebook discussing and then yesterday I noticed a Twitter thread started by someone in the Bootcamp world asking people what their first language was which resulted in answers ranging from JS to PHP to Perl to a bunch of others.

A common refrain against requiring CS in our K12 schools is that we don't have the teachers and we won't any time soon. Sure, we don't right now but we won't if we don't do something about it. The question to ask is "how long will it take" and "how do we get there?" Let's look at New York City. We've got approximately 1,000,000 students in our public schools. Let's say that's grades 1 to 12.

<blockquote> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? – Brian Kernighan </blockquote> Debugging is what the third episode of the CS Ed Podcast was all about. Kristin Stephens-Martinez of Duke University speaks with Amy Ko of the University of Washington. The long and the short of it is that debugging is hard, teaching is hard, and teaching debugging is hard.