When looking for assignments for our classes, in addition to trying to craft assignments that develop and reinforce key ideas, we also strive to come up with ideas that “speak” to the students and keep their interest. We write small games, use problems within the student’s experiences, and in general try to find problems that are appealing. This is much easier to do when the kids can read data from a file.

Last week was crazy. Busy, stressful, late night after late night. It ended, though, on a great note. A young lady in my intro class found me in my office near the end of the day: Student: Mr. Z, I wanted to make sure to catch you before vacation! Me: What’s up? Student: I wanted to tell you that today’s lesson was AWESOME!!!!!! Wow. I’ve been teaching 23 years and that’s never happened before!

My last post I was talking about the fact that as teachers, our knowledge and experience is frequently trivialized. The tenor of the times is that anyone can design a course, anyone can teach, and in fact, we don't even need teachers, just videos or computer based systems. If you've ever tutored a friend, you're more than qualified. That might be a strong statement but everywhere you look you see "

This post was supposed to be about varsity academic teams but I wanted to share something else first. For years I was unhappy with our "research" course but due to the misguided views of our past administration, I pretty much had to keep it running. Over the same time, I was frustrated by the fact that there was so much missing in our students computer science related education. Specifically, kids don't really get to experience creating large "

Sorting from the top and from the bottom I've been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks, but some times life just gets in the way. I've always thought it important to arm students with as many different tools with which to attack problems as possible. As such, the courses I teach use a number of different languages, each highlighting a different paradigm and thought process.

Just a short follow up on the last post. In thinking about how I frequently programs, once I have a plan, I work on one part of the project, and then ask myself "what's next?" That is, what is the next step towards completion. It reminded me about a guest speaker we had a about a year and a half ago at one of our "professional development" days. For the past two years, our school has had "

Closed out last week teaching the Towers of Hanoi. It's a wonderful topic. Not because it's so interesting in and of itself, but as a platform from which you can explore any number of interesting topics. Many books appropriate for the AP (AB) curriculum mention the towers, but to my knowledge most only scratch the surface. I randomly grabbed two books that I consider good from the shelf before writing this.

For the winter break, I assigned this set of A exam questions (actually, just the three that don't deal with the case study) to my AP classes. I wanted to assign something that wasn't particularly heavy but I didn't want my students to forget everything over break. As with most AP exam questions, they're long, wordy, and somewhat brain dead. They take a long time to read, but they frequently take you step by step through what they want you to do.