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.

Now that high school seniors have all committed to their respective colleges I though I'd share some information on Hunter's incoming Daedalus (honors CS) cohort. I joke about the first cohort saying that nobody applied to the program. That's kind of true. I jointed Hunter a little over three years ago in late January. That was after high school seniors had already applied to college and at that time the program didn't exist.

One of the things I mentioned in my post on the CS Educators StackExchange was the fragmentation of resources for CS Educators. My friend and fellow CS teacher Ben pointed out that this is appropriate as we're so young as a community. He's absolutely right but until we mature, discover-ability can be a problem. We all have our resources and I for one am frequently surprised when talking to a friend and discovering that they don't know about a site or a mailing list that I've known about for years.

The CS Educators StackExchange is now in public beta. For those of you who are not in tech, StackExchange is a network of question answering sites. StackOverflow is probably the most famous - many peoples go to site for computer science and programming questions and answers. During this period of public beta the site will be working on defining itself and also on developing a critical mass of users. I hope the site succeeds and I encourage everyone to check it out, ask questions, answer some and let's all see where this goes.