We've been talking sorting and searching in our teacher certification program and today was all about the merge sort. One of the strategies we use when teaching it in person involves sorting a deck of cards by Tom Sawyering it with the class. It's fun and it's effective but you can't do it over Zoom. What to do? We didn't want to just jump into the nuts and bolts of merge sort.

Time for some thoughts after week 2. Since this is the inaugural edition of our program and there was no way to really know what the cohort would be like we've been adjusting on the fly. This was expected but we're finally starting to settle in. We're still finding more zoom heavy days but as we move towards the end of our data structures segment there should be fewer of those.

While tools like Zoom, Slack and others are a tremendous boon as we're forced to do all our teaching remotely the limitations become apparent as we settle in and try to go beyond the basics of an offsite meeting. Today was code review day in my CS1 class. It's a lesson that I enjoy teaching and I think my students get a lot out of it. Today we had to do it remote.

I didn't expect to read a Fred Wilson post on teaching online but that's what I found when I visited his blog this morning. Don't get me wrong - I suspect that Fred has the makings of a great teacher, it's just not what I expected to find. There have been many posts about education but I don't recall any about teaching or more specifically the art of teaching. I did find this post though which actually speaks to some of the thoughts today's post got churning.

Over at AVC Fred Wilson just posted about Outschool's efforts to support students and teachers in the event of school closures due to the Coronavirus. All the details and relevant links are in the post. I looked a bit into Outschool when Fred first wrote about them but never had a chance to do a deep dive. Now, internet based teaching is not going to be as effective as in person teaching but I was thinking about how far things have come.

Every few years the experts give us some new magic bullet, some new teaching fad research based pedagogical technique. Teachers are trained in it, forced to use it - frequently as a one size fits all. If we do, we're good teachers, if we don't we get the dreaded ineffective on our annual ratings. I was reminded of this when reading Mark Guzdial's recent blog post on things he got wrong in Computing Education.

I run periodic professional development sessions here in New York with my partner in crime JonAlf Dyrland-Weaver. I call them PD for "APCS-A, similar or beyond" and they're designed to fill a professional development gap. We try to run them once a month but it's a little less frequent than that. The NYCDOE has taken on the monster task of CS for all and since they're trying to get to everyone they have to run a bazillion sessions but all at an introductory level.

I was working on writing a midterm the other day so figured I'd talk a bit about my test grading policy. Before getting to the specifics, let me set the stage. I spent most of my career at Stuyvesant - a public magnet school in NYC. There are many great students who are interested in learning but there's also a focus on grades. and this leads to a non-insignificant portion of the student body that is grade obsessed and will do everything and anything for every point possible.

There are things we do in school and there are things we do in industry and they're not always the same. In school we might use a learning language or an IDE which gives additional support and at times even take away language features while at work you might you might make heavy use of continuous integration tools. On the other hand, sometimes we use the same things. Java is used in schools and in industry, StackOverflow consulted in both and many schools use professional IDEs like Eclipse.

I recently did a unit where I had my students convert words into Pig Latin. I like the problem because to start it only requires strings, functions and if statements but there is some depth to the unit. We start with simplified rules: If the word starts with a vowel, add "ay" to the end of the word If it starts with a consonant move the first latter to the end and add "ay" don't worry about anything else Students usually start with something like this: