It's no secret that I'm something of an old curmudgeon in the K12 CS Education world and I've been critical of a number of initiatives and organizations over the years but I've been pretty quiet on the CS4All movement in NYC Department of Education. I've had and any number of concerns though. This past week at the inaugural meeting of New York City's CSTA chapter we got a taste of the NYC CS4All Blueprint.

Now that I'm back from vacation and summer's winding down I thought I'd start getting back to more classroom related posts. I still have a few summer topics I want to write about – standards and side projects in particular but I'm also looking forward to talking more about the classroom since, after all, at my core, I'm a teacher. When I saw this article in my inbox this morning I thought I'd talk about it.

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.

AP scores just came out. As usual, I see the posts and take part in conversations where teachers talk about their results. Some are happy about their results, some aren't, some don't really care. I just want to make a plea to all AP teachers out there: Don't let your value be dictated by the college board or any other exam. I never really cared much about my students' actual AP scores.

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.

Just completed the second time through for my Software Development course. Last year we had a great time at our Demo Night hosted at Google. This year, unfortunately, due to a variety of reasons, we couldn't get the event together. Still, the kids did great work so I thought I'd share. This year, I asked each group to make a short video. First up, we've got bit<<shift - a search engine for code.

The subtitle of this post is: and why my students are going to hate me tomorrow. When my good friend Gerry Seidman talks to my classes, he frequently says “never use a data structure or algorithm you couldn’t build yourself.” This doesn’t mean that you have to write everything from scratch, just that you should have some knowledge as to what’s going on under the hood. I find that all too often young programmers just rely on APIs and libraries and really don’t know how their computers and programs are working.

On going back to work today Since school was still out due to Sandy, we ran a second online class yesterday. At the end of the session, which I’ll summarize below, I told the class what I wanted them to accomplish today and over the weekend. One student queried “you mean no class on Friday :-(?” Alas no – while students aren’t reporting to school this morning, teachers are. Of course the logic as to why is far from sound.

Here's what the bridge leading across the West Side Highway over to Stuy during the storm. Hence the title with the weak tech reference. The storm has kept the schools closed all week so it's as good a time as any to try to resurrect this blog. As you can see, I've moved from blogger to a Jekyll based blog hosted on Github. I'm really liking the way it works but more on that at a later date.

Anyone can cook - Chef Gusteau These days the rage seems anyone can code. On line attempts to teach coding and computing abound. We've got Udacity and Coursera trying to bring college level academic offerings to the masses on one extreme and more down to earth "learn to code" efforts with Codecademy getting the most press. While I applaud any effort to make knowledge more accessible, there are a lot of unanswered questions as to the effectiveness of these latest attempts.