Yesterday Mark Guzdial blogged about a NY Times piece discussing Silicon Valleys influence on education through Code.org. Mark questioned the validity of the piece. If you don't read Mark's blog and you're in CS Ed you probably should. I tried to leave a comment on Mark's blog - not about the NY Times article but rather my thoughts on why I think it's important that we remain wary and vigilant to industry and outsiders influence and impact on CS education and on education in general.

For anyone involved in K12 CS education, the past few years have been a wild ride. When I first tried to make inroads in the DOE decades ago I couldn't get through the door. Now, CS Education is everyone's darling. It's really amazing. It's been a combination of grass roots efforts by teachers, non profit education efforts such as TEALS, advocacy of groups like Code.org and amazing individuals like Fred Wilson who has probably done more to move the needle of CS Ed in NY than any other 10 people combined.

I was part of this conversation the other day: When science teachers asked me if I taught AP Java I'd always respond by asking them if they taught AP Microscope. — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) July 7, 2017 I always use that line to emphasize that I teach CS - a way of thinking and problem solving and looking at the world. The languages we use in our classes are tools to help us communicate ideas not the ends but rather a means.

Over on Facebook, a fellow CS educator 1 made a comment on something he wanted to try with his students this summer: having the students pre-disclose bugs when they submit their projects. The post was asking for any links to "the literature." I can't speak to that but I I've done something similar to what the post was asking about so, as per usual, I thought I'd write about it here.

Over on the CS Educator StachExchange, which is in private beta for a few more days, I saw a post asking about how to introduce the A* search algorithm. I taught A* as part of the APCS class at Stuy so I thought I'd talk about what I did here. Some time around mid year, we get to intermediate recursion. This is about the time, give or take, when we talk about the nlogn sorts.

This morning, Mark Guzdial wrote about Stanford possibly moving away from Java as their intro language. This comes on the heels of a semi-regular thread on one of the lists I'm on asking about what languages are used at assorted colleges around the country. Invariably the Pascal -> C++ -> Java progression of APCS turns up in these threads. There are plenty of arguments to be made both for and against pretty much any language or platform.

Both at and prior to SIGCSE 2017, I promised to write up the steps I take to introduce and use revision control systems in my classes. This series is not meant to be a git or GitHub tutorial. There are plenty of those already (two of which I've linked to below). This is about the process I use with my students to get them up to speed. As with any new tool, there will be some resistance but once git saves them once, they get religion.

As a high school teacher, I was never able to attend SIGCSE, the conference of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. Between the number of instructional days I would lose and the cost, I could never justify going. Instead I looked over the proceedings and read many of the papers. Now that I'm at Hunter, I was finally able to attend. This year in Seattle, the conference ran from Wednesday through Saturday.

A few days ago, I saw a piece on David Heinemeier Hansson's tweet on whiteboard interviews: Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles. — DHH (@dhh) February 21, 2017 I'm not a huge fan of the whiteboard interview but I think many of the tweets missed the point.

I've been planning to put together a response to Alfred Thompson's recent post - Software Developers - Quantity vs Quality. TL;DR, although it isn't really long and I do encourage you to read Alfred's post: a couple of articles talk about how the U.S. has the most people entering CS competitions like HackerRank but Americans are not at the top of the leaderboard. does this mean that there's less talent in America?