Monday's the start of the Spring semester. Other than the 8:00am start I'm looking forward to it. My 8:00am class is the honors/lab component that goes with CS1. I taught it last semester and during each of the past two years at Hunter. My second class is the follow up - more OOP / C++, data structures and some algorithms. The material is old hat. I've taught it in Java more times than I can count and also in C++ albeit many years ago.

Following up on my last post I thought I'd talk a bit more about course development. According to most powers that be it's all done ahead of time. Organizations and companies with curricula to sell package it all up ahead of time lesson by lesson unit by unit. When I create a new course at Hunter, they demand a sample syllabus during the approval process with a week by week outline, assignments reading and more.

I spent a couple of days last week hunkered down working designing a CS Ethics course and of course it got me thinking about designing courses in general. One of the topics I've ranted on is my disdain for canned curricula. I've never been a fan. This isn't to say I don't want to leverage other people's work. I'll take sample curricula, lessons, and all the resources I can get my hands on but I'd never just deliver them as is.

I wanted to chime in on Alfred Thompson's post last week on what to include in a HS CS class but was working on moving blogging platforms so didn't get a chance so I'll say a few words here. If you've been here before you probably know I'm not a fan of the standards and I certainly am no fan of the College Board and the AP program so what's my take?

I think it's time for me to start developing a CS Ethics class. An ethics course isn't a replacement for having teachers that live and model good behavior and weave ethical issues throughout the curriculum but still, adding a separate course on top of that has its merits. I'm not in a rush to create this course. I might be done in a month or it might take a couple of years.

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.

This morning, I read Alfred Thompson's post on teaching cybersecurity. as Alfred says, it's something of a CS Ed buzzword this summer. Another hot topic in K12 CS Ed this summer is the inclusion of ethics in our CS courses courtesy of efforts like the #ethicalCS twitter chat every Wednesday at 8:00 Eastern time hosted by Saber Khan. Discussions about both topics include "where should we be doing this?" "What should we be doing?

One of the hats I wear at Hunter is to build a new CS Honors program and to bring my particular brand of insanity to Hunter College CS as a whole. Yesterday was my last class for the semester so I thought I'd write a bit about the course. For the Fall semester, I taught an intro programming course to the entire cohort. For some in the cohort, this was their first exposure to CS.

Scheme is one of the languages used in Stuy's intro CS course. Like any other language, there are pros and cons of using it to introduce students to CS. Here are some of the reasons why I like Scheme as a first language and why despite that, I don't recommend it in many cases. Scheme certainly isn't mainstream. That's not the main reason why I like it but it is a side benefit.

I was catching up with the team at Stuy the other day and they mentioned that they were periodically getting pushback on their choice of languages, particularly in the intro class. The pushback was mostly in the form of "why don't you start them with Javascript?" Back in the day, when I created our intro class where we use Scheme, NetLogo and then later Python, I'd get similar pushback but then it was "why not Java?