I was planning on writing up all the exciting CS Education work I got to be involved in these past two days but I saw a post on one of the CS discussion forums that got me riled. There's a teacher (name withheld to protect the innocent) who wants to create an advanced course for his students but his administration is requesting an outside measure of accountability. This sounds reasonable on the surface but I found it really insulting.

I'm enjoying reading about Ria Galanos' new chapter on her blog. In her most recent post Ria briefly talks about the fact that very few professional developers start from scratch and most work in existing large code bases. She wonders why the College Board got rid of the APCS-A case study and talked about how it gave students an opportunity to work on a multi-file complex system. Over the past few years others have wondered if the College Board should bring it back.

So, I got back from CSTA2019 and promptly got a summer cold which laid me up for the past couple of days. Phoenix was beautiful even with it being unbearably hot at times and it's a place I think I'd like to visit again when it's a bit cooler. I said in an earlier post that for me, CSTA is typically more of a person conference and less of a session conference and that held true again.

Looking forward to flying out to Phoenix for CSTA-2019 Saturday morning. The conference doesn't officially start until Sunday, Monday for me since I'm not doing any of the pre-conference workshops. We'll have most of Saturday as long as we're up to it, Sunday, and Monday morning. Actually, there is the GitHub reception on Sunday evening so that's kind of official conference stuff. As to the conference, I'm super looking forward to it.

No,I'm not talking aboutArgument from Authority - something that very much plagues CS Education and education in general where an annointed few who may, or may not really know what they're talking about are given creedence because they've been there the longest, work for the companies with the biggest names, have the economic backing or otherwise have been given the stage. I'm talking about Proof by Authority which I fondly remember from those silly Proof techniques lists that went around in the day.

Now that the semester's over I've had a chance to reflect a bit on my teaching over the past year. This year I taught two classes each semester so the load was a little higher. First semester was one class of our CS0 and one of the lab/enrichment component that goes with CS1. Nothing big to report there as I've done them both before. The biggest difference was that I had to deal with two separate classes even though they're one cohort.

Someone mentioned Grokking Algorithms by Aditya Y. Bhargava in one of the CS educator Facbeook groups. It looked interesting so I thought I'd give it a once over. It's certainly an accessible book. Text mixed with cute line drawings, "hand written" text, diagrams and picture.s It reminded me of one of my favorite, most accessible Calculus books Who Was Fourier. Overall I enjoyed the book but I'm not sure what its best audience is.

Reading Garth Flint's end of year post and Alfred Thompson's follow up had me thinking about a couple of things. One was spurred when Garth wrote "They also have to figure out the math before they code." This made me think about all the details we sometimes take for for granted. Things that are hard for our students that we just know. It's frequently math that we might find trivial but it could also be much simpler things.

Just like last year, I'm taking in two classes worth of students in to my honors program. The challenge is that I can only teach two classes and I've got to figure out what to teach and then which students belong in which class. It basically comes down to one of two courses, our CS0 (CSCI127) and our CS1 (CSCI135). CSCI127 is a first programming experience. The normal class is taught as a large lecture with small recitation/labs.

Lat day of the 2019 NCWIT Summmit. Got up crazy early, got back from my run and saw this when I checked Twitter: A1: CSTA, Twitter chats like this one, @guzdial and @alfredtwo's blogs among others. In all cases because those places start from assuming I'm a CS teacher, rather than starting from assuming I'm a teacher who is better at teaching something else. #csk8 https://t.co/6DO77fzq0j — Sarah Judd (@SarahEJudd) May 16, 2019 I don't usually participate in Twitter chats.