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.

The state got back to us the other week on our CSEd programs. Still no approval. One of the requirements is that we have 12 graduate CS credits in our program and that in those courses these five major areas: Algorithms and programming Computing systems Data and analysis Impacts of computing Networks and the internet as described in the K12 CS Framework. Even though many of the items described in the framework fit better in an education side course NY is requiring that it's all covered in CS courses offered by a CS department.

It's great to see how much Hunter CS has developed since starting here there years ago. The latest endeavor is Winter Codefest. During the fall I was approached by one of my students who had asked an older Hunter CS student about their portfolio and found that the senior's portfolio was lacking. This student said we should do something to help encourage younger students to build that portfolio. The result was Winter Codefest.

A question that frequently comes up with respect to CS for All is what does it mean? To me it means giving all students some fundamental exposure to computer science so that they can: Make use of those thinking skills, problem solving approaches, and practical tools regardless of their future paths. Provide a path for the subset of "all" that desire to further pursue computer science. But even with this, how do you do it?

Everybody know's I'm the Statler and Waldorf of the CS Education world. I've been known to be "prickly," which is a nice way of putting it and I'm openly critical of many programs out there. One program, however, that I very much like is TEALS. They've been around since 2009 founded by Kevin Wang, a former teacher. The basic idea was to have tech professionals go to a school on the way to work and team teach a CS class with one of the school's teachers.

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.

Tomorrow morning I fly out to Seattle for SIGCSE 2017. For those of you not in the CS Education space, SIGCSE is the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) special interest group for computer science education. I've wanted to go for years but have never been able. It's hard for a high school teacher to miss a week in mid March, particularly in places with a school calendar similar to New York.