I tweeted this the other day: Why don't so many teachers and professors understand that the test or assignment you can do in 15 minutes will take your beginning students at least an hour and probably a lot more to complete. — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) April 18, 2018 What led to the tweet was a discussion I was having with some students about not having enough time on tests which led to a discussion of having to drop everything to spend every waking hour on a project.

Alfred Thompson wrote about CS education tools earlier today. I've also been meaning to write on the topic but from a different point of view. I do my best to keep up with the latest and greatest in the CS world both on the academic side as well as the professional one. That's not really possible, but I do my best. When I have a small project to work on I'll some times use it as an excuse to play with some recent technology.

I've been meaning to write about ethics in CS education for a while. Probably since I saw this article in the NY Times but got sidetracked. I was reminded when I saw this tweet by Hadi the other day: This message is bigger than Facebook. Computer science faces an ethics crisis. That’s why @codeorg covers ethics and digital citizenship in our computer science courses. (And we’re thankful that most of the largest tech companies support us) https://t.

The ACM recently announced this year's winners of the Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing. Over on his blog, Alfred Thompson noted that the winners were either from independent or magnet public schools. Alfred also noted that most of the winners of prestigious science competitions like the Regeneron Science Talent Search (nee Intel, nee Westinghouse) were from public magnet schools. In his post, Alfred ruminates on this and wonders "how to we add the flexibility and support to more students at more schools?

Next up from SIGCSE 2018 is John MacCormick's session on Strategies for Baing the CS Theory Course on Non-decision Problems MacCormicks's stance is that CS theory is tough the first time around and using non-decision problems is a viable approach to make theory more accessible to beginners. As MacCormick said in his paper: … a decision problem may ask the yes/no question, "Does this graph have a Hamilton cycle?" The corresponding non-decision problem is, "Please give me a Hamilton cycle of this graph if it has one.

After reading a couple of comments on my last post where I talked a bit about practitioners vs researchers I thought I'd expand and expound a bit. While there are education researchers that I very much respect, overall, I'm skeptical of education research. Note that I'm not talking specifically about CS Ed research but rather education research in general. Let's go back to the beginning. I entered teaching from industry.

In the New York City department of education a recurring hot topic is the Absent Teacher Reserve or ATR pool. A teacher or administrator in the ATR pool is a licensed, most likely tenured teacher not assigned permanently to a school. Each year these educators get shuttled from school to school and denied a chance to actually settle in a position. The ATR pool was created under the Bloomberg administration.

Last April I woke up early and trekked up to Albany along with a few of my Hunter College colleagues to share our thoughts on K12 Computer Science teacher certification with the Board of Regents. We gave a presentation to the Regents Higher Education Committee and afterwards had a chance to talk with some of the Regents as well as other members of the New York State Department of Education.

Today was Election Day. One of the few days each year when students stay home and teachers spend all day attending what is generously known as professional development. Years ago I was in a room with a few colleagues when my friend Dave - one of the best math teachers I know said "you know, every time we have a PD day in NJ and my wife and I have to scramble to take care of the kids I get a little annoyed but then think I shouldn't get annoyed since they're spending the day doing all sorts of valuable PD.

One thing I've learned from teaching is that there's always something new to learn. For the kids, yes, but I'm talking about for the teacher. The other day, I taught a lesson I've taught many times. Find the mode of a data set. That's the problem that they solve but the lesson is really about run time complexity, hidden complexity and using data structures in alternate ways. I blogged about this before so you can get an earlier take there although the code isn't formatted correctly due to blog conversions.