Following up on a previous post, we're going to continue to talk about playing with text. This time, building and working with a bag of words from a text. A bag of words is a simple language processing model where you just consider individual words in a text. What they are and how many times they occur. This is a pretty simple model but you can still have a good bit of fun with your students with it.

I've been spending a lot of time at area high schools this fall. Today I was at FDR High School in Broooklyn. <figure><img src="" width="500px"/> </figure> I only learned about FDR HS a little over a year ago when I met their CS teacher Josh Hans at a NYC PD event. I visit last fall and then again today. Whenever I visit a school it's a different experience. Sometimes I speak to the CS classes, sometimes at an event like a CS Week hackathon, once I even got to address an entire senior class in an auditorium.

What can I do to discourage my students from using the "break" statement? That was more or less the gist of the comment and it elicited some good responses. This time the conversation was on Facebook but I've seen this one and participated in it many times before. I never liked the question when presented as a "how can I stop them" one. I equally dislike when the offered advice is basically "never use break no matter what" or something similar.

I recently stumbled upon Laurie Barth on Twitter and noticed a couple of tweets about tech interviews and the hiring process, something I've been thinking about recently. Solid rant. I think the teach to the programming test market already exists. And it’s why interviewers who subscribe to these tactics get upset if a candidate admits they’ve seen the problem previously. Because it ruins the illusion that this is revealing how candidates think.

It's spring break and for me that's always been a good time to explore some new ideas. Here's one that some of you might like, particularly if you're teaching APCS-A or something similar. Many APCS-A teachers do a unit on image processing using the picture lab (alternate resource). Image processing is a nice platform to explore two dimensional arrays. You basically use a 2D array of pixels (points) to represent an image.

<figure class="z_image_center"><img src=""/> </figure> The Nifty Assignments session at SGICSE is always a popular one. Go to the site and you'll find links to all the assignments presented from 1999 to the present year. On the one hand, it's a great resource. On the other, the assignments vary in nifty-ness depending on one's personal taste. To me, there seemed to be a run of nifty assignments that were really just "take a generic assignment and fancy up the graphics" mixed in with one's that I found really cool.

It's that time of the year to write a series of blog posts about SIGCSE. I thought I'd start with one on the keynotes. There were four keynote speakers. Marie desJardins, Gloria Townsend, Mark Guzdial, and Blair Taylor. I wasn't at the first timer's lunch where Townsend spoke so I won't talk at all about that keynote. I'm also not going to summarize the talks. Andy Ko wrote up a terrific summary of his SIGCSE experience and did a much better job giving overviews to the keynotes than I ever could so I'll just refer you to Andy's blog post.

Back in December we ran our first PD session for CS teachers. This was to address the need for professional development for teachers who were more experienced in terms of computer science - we aimed this at people who were ready to teach APCS-A, similar, or beyond and also to start to build a community for these teachers. We had trouble setting things up for February but we're good to go for March, April and May.

Two of the hardest topics to make meaningful to students in APCS-A are inheritance and interfaces. It's not that they're super difficult topics but rather that they're not often needed, useful, or superior to not using them on beginner assignments. More often than not the motivation is a bit forced as are the assignments. Inheritance is its own can of worms and to be honest, something I've not found to be all that useful or necessary.

So many programming assignments involve a direct solution. Write a program to do this or write a problem to solve that. It's pretty typical. There's nothing wrong with assignments like these. They allow students to practice what they've been learning and it gives them the opportunity to create some cool programs. All the same, I like it when there's an indirect problem. You're faced with a problem but in order to solve it you first have to solve some other problem