Yesterday I was back on campus for an early orientation session for Hunter's incoming Daedalus CS honors students. It was the first time all of us got to meet face to face. The students I met with will be my third cohort. I got to thinking how far we've come in under three years. Hunter's had a strong but little known undergraduate CS program for as long as I've known.

I replied this tweet yesterday and thought I'd expound a bit. We started kids using scheme on 10th grade at stuy so did recursion early. Not everyone got all of it but it think it made things much easier for those that you more CS later. — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) May 29, 2018 We introduced recursion very early in our intro course at Stuy and I think it worked well.

About a week ago New York State's new regulation creating a K12 CS teacher certification went live. Just the other day I was honored to be interviewed by Matt Flamm of Crain's New York in a follow up piece about it. Having K12 CS teacher certification is big and having quality programs that lead to certification is HUGE. In my view, it's a game changer. Let's Focus on high school, my wheelhouse.

Today's the last day of spring break. After the weekend it's back to the grind. It really hasn't been much of a spring break. The rain and the snow made for very little spring and between working on the Hunter / CUNY2X Internship program and reviewing applications for my Hunter Daedalus CS Honors program there has been very little break. Today was no exception - I spent much of the day working but I did take a few hours to head over to Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island.

Alfred Thompson wrote about CS education tools earlier today. I've also been meaning to write on the topic but from a different point of view. I do my best to keep up with the latest and greatest in the CS world both on the academic side as well as the professional one. That's not really possible, but I do my best. When I have a small project to work on I'll some times use it as an excuse to play with some recent technology.

There's so much to like in the shape drawing lessons I talked about in my refactoring post that I thought I'd share a little more here. It can be argued that the most important things for a program to do is work. The most clever, elegant, creative program is worthless if it doesn't produce the desired result. All too often, beginners and hot shot beginners in particular try to be too clever too early and get themselves into trouble.

One of my laments on teaching computer science is that students are rarely taught and given the chance to develop good programming practices. There's usually not enough time. Beginners work on small "toys" which don't lend themselves to good software development practices and later on, there's so much other material like algorithms, data structures etc. to teach and learn that programming practices usually amount to lines like: "Make sure to comment your code.

A few weeks ago I wrote about introducing testing in CS classes, specifically using a testing framework. In that post I talked about the plan but now I can talk about the results. My class interleaves with Hunter's CSCI 13500 - Software Analysis and Design I class. One day each week, my students have complete a hands on lab focusing on whatever is being covered in the 13500 class. I decided to use one of those labs as a first foray into testing.

Next up from SIGCSE 2018 is John MacCormick's session on Strategies for Baing the CS Theory Course on Non-decision Problems MacCormicks's stance is that CS theory is tough the first time around and using non-decision problems is a viable approach to make theory more accessible to beginners. As MacCormick said in his paper: … a decision problem may ask the yes/no question, "Does this graph have a Hamilton cycle?" The corresponding non-decision problem is, "Please give me a Hamilton cycle of this graph if it has one.

I really didn't know what to expect at the Creativity, Customization, and Ownership: Game Design in Bootstrap: Algebra session. I've been a big fan of Bootstrep for years and looking at the authors, Emmanuel Schanzer's been a freind forever. I've never met Shriram Krishnamurthi in person but am looking forward to it. We've traded emails and blog comments. I'd like to consider him a friend and I certainly respect him and his work even though we frequently disagree around the edges.