I wasn't going to go to this session. I started out in a panel on integrating social good into CS Ed. With the panel not meeting my expectations I moved over to my second choice - the system programming sessions where I saw Implementing Malloc: Students and Systems Programming, a paper presented by Brian Railing of CMU. I really liked both the paper and the talk. CMU computer science students all take a systems course that uses Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective.

I've been having fun with this years Advent of Code competition. So far, I've been able to keep up but with I expect that to change in another couple of days since I'll be traveling for the weekend. After solving a problem, I like looking over some of the other solutions on the Advent of Code subreddit. Even with similar agorithmic solutions there's a decent amount of variation in the actual code and solutions in different languages can look radically different.

This morning, Mark Guzdial wrote about Stanford possibly moving away from Java as their intro language. This comes on the heels of a semi-regular thread on one of the lists I'm on asking about what languages are used at assorted colleges around the country. Invariably the Pascal -> C++ -> Java progression of APCS turns up in these threads. There are plenty of arguments to be made both for and against pretty much any language or platform.

When I started using git and GitHub with my students it was a natural progression having started with started with CVS and then, as technology changed moving through Subversion and then Mercurial. It was all about using sensible professional software development techniques while making it easier for students to submit work and for me to evaluate their submissions. Over time, I found that git and GitHub in fact provided some extra support for educators right out of the box.

Last Friday, Mark Guzdial wrote about the woes of using clickers in a class. The amount of effort required to use his school's approved clicker technology sounds ridiculous so while we need tools to better engage students in large class settings we need better tools that can be integrated into our classes more easily. I've never used clickers. On top of stories like Mark's, there are a number of problems with using clickers in a public school.

Today we're looking at Advent of Code 2016 number 2. To change things up, I thought I'd do a video where I live code a solution. The solution I present is pretty straightforward - use a 2D array (or technically, an array of strings) to represent the keypad, parse the input, and follow the input instructions to build the code. One of the things I really like about Advent of Code is that every problem has two parts and depending on how you solved part 1, you may or may not have extra work to do for part 2.

I recently posted about Advent of Code - a series of programming problems relseased one a day. While they vary in terms of level of difficulty, a number of them make nice problems for introductory to mid level programming classes. I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on a few of them starting with the first problem from this years competition. Take a minute to read it over.

We're now a week in to my first class at Hunter. It's a little early for me to really compare and contrast the high school to college experience but I thought I'd share some thoughts on a tool that I've recently started to play with. My students were all supposed to be issued laptops at the beginning of the semester. The plan was to have them learn Linux, the command line, and a little DevOps along the way.

I spent last Saturday up at the Microsoft offices in Times Square observing a TEALS training session. My fried Nathaniel Granor, Teals Regional Manager in the east has invited me a number of times and this time I was able to make it. If you don't know, TEALS is a program that takes volunteers in the tech industry and places them in classrooms. Unlike other programs, the TEALS volunteers work with the teachers while the kids learn some CS.

I received an email from a friend the other day asking me about a particular robotics platform she recently saw. I've played with robotics on and off over the years ranging from building them from (not using) scratch using Atmel chips and programming them in assembly to using Arduino based platforms to using pre-built robot platforms. They're really cool and since they interact with the real world you can do all sorts of interesting and motivational things with students.