Our summer intensive was, well, pretty intensive. We met all day every day for a month and knocked out four classes. Programming (CS1) Data Structures Topics Methods If you ever took or taught a summer session class, you know that time is tight and generally you cover a little less than in a fall or spring semester class. N credits in 5 weeks just isn't the same as those same N credits spread over 13.

Now that the summer portion of Hunter College's Advanced Certificate in Teaching Computer Science is over I thought I'd do a postmortem. That is, a few posts about what we did and how it all went. First, though, an overview of the program. The Advanced Certificate program is geared towards teachers who are currently certified in another subject area who wish to earn an additional New York State teaching certificate in Computer Science.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yesterday we held our third monthly Professional Development session for teachers of "APCS-A, Similar, and Beyond." It's great to see that we're starting to form a core of a community of CS teachers teaching some of the more advanced classes as there is a core group that keeps coming back for more. Even better is the fact that we're gaining a couple of new teachers at each session. Last time, we were at Digital Ocean, a cloud provide that has been very involved in education since their creation and has been a tremendous boon to my education projects over the years.

Now and again there are requests on the assorted CS Education forums asking about which text book to use. These requests are usually for APCS-A. There are usually a number of "I'm very happy with …" replies but I thought I'd take a bit of a deeper dive into what teachers might want to consider when evaluating a textbook. It was never an issue when I started as a math teacher.

<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.

Since Hunter uses C++ as it's core language, I haven't used Java much in the past three years. That's going to change pretty soon. Once we start offering our CS teacher Certificate and Masters programs I'll once again start teaching with Java as that's one of the langauges that we want to prepare our teachers with. That means deciding on a set of tools and so I've been spending time evaluating Java programming environments with an eye on the beginner since not only do the teachers I work with have to be comfortable with the tool but more importantly they will have to be able to support the tool for all of their students.