I wasn't going to go to this session. I started out in a panel on integrating social good into CS Ed. With the panel not meeting my expectations I moved over to my second choice - the system programming sessions where I saw Implementing Malloc: Students and Systems Programming, a paper presented by Brian Railing of CMU. I really liked both the paper and the talk. CMU computer science students all take a systems course that uses Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective.

With CS4All being the buzzword of the day we're paying a lot of attention to the fact that when we teach a CS class for all students, most of them won't end up studying CS or going directly into a tech heavy field. Among those that do study CS though, there is another division. Those studying CS as an academic exercise or to go on to graduate studies and those who are going in to the tech sector.

Advanced Placement Computer Science got top billing on Alfred Thompson's Things I'm Watching in 2017 post. Alfred talks about how APCS-P exploded onto the scene and wonders what will happen with APCS this year. I have some questions as well but mine won't be answered for years to come, if ever. Like it or not, the College Board has an out sized influence on K12 education. As long as people are convinced that AP=good there will be a push for more and more AP classes and APCS-P is a perfect class to push.

I usually don't do year in review posts. At Stuy, not much changed year after year so I never felt it worth summarizing the past and projecting the future. At Hunter, now that I'm a couple of years in, projects are really picking up steam so I think it's worth talking about them. One of my two major missions at Hunter was to build a CS Honors program and raise the profile of Hunter's undergraduate CS program in general.

This question appeared on Facebook a few days ago: Does anyone have an effective way to teach students how to break down a problem into steps and then solve each step one by one? I think my students are struggling with a large question and breaking it in subsequent parts. There were some good suggestions. I wanted to add something but didn't have time then so I thought I'd write it up now.

Last April I woke up early and trekked up to Albany along with a few of my Hunter College colleagues to share our thoughts on K12 Computer Science teacher certification with the Board of Regents. We gave a presentation to the Regents Higher Education Committee and afterwards had a chance to talk with some of the Regents as well as other members of the New York State Department of Education.

It's once again time for Advent of Code. That one a day programming competition that's been running now for three years. Here are some thoughts on day 1. The core of the problem is that you have a large string of digits and you have to calculate a checksum. This is done by adding the sum of a subset of the digits. Only the ones that are identical to the digit to their right.

Thks question was posed the other day - how can one get students to truly understand the quicksort algorithm? I've written a few posts about quicksort. The last time I did a lesson writeup on the subject I wrote about first looking and quickselect and then moving to the quicksort. The class was first faced with the problem of writing a routine to find the Kth smallest item in an unsorted data set.

Today was Election Day. One of the few days each year when students stay home and teachers spend all day attending what is generously known as professional development. Years ago I was in a room with a few colleagues when my friend Dave - one of the best math teachers I know said "you know, every time we have a PD day in NJ and my wife and I have to scramble to take care of the kids I get a little annoyed but then think I shouldn't get annoyed since they're spending the day doing all sorts of valuable PD.

We all love interesting problems. The trouble is that it's hard to find suitably interesting problems for students when they're just learning the basics. In the very beginning the problems practically dictate the solution: loop over a list and add all the elements or calculate the sum of a list of integers. Determine if number is prime Convert a word into pig-Latin It's not that there's no thought involved in solving these but the students already know the mechanics of solving these by hand so it's a direct translation into a program.