Yesterday, I saw the New York Premiere of Navajo Math Circles, a documentary on a Math Circle put in place to support and enrich the currently under-served community in the Navajo educational system. At their core, Math Circles are math outreach and enrichment programs. I'm most familiar with the New York Math Circle. I'm friends with many of their teachers and organizers and my son took part in their summer program for a couple of years.

Edit: Just a brief note to clarify a couple of things. As indicated in the comments, this post isn't about what's appropriate for HS CS. It's more about what kids have after they finish their education - be it high school, college, code school, or other. Some of my thoughts are the results of pondering on the exacerbations of friends after interviewing people for entry level positions. The two examples are just to illustrate the point.

This weekend, I had a conversation on Twitter with my friend Roy Bahat: @zamansky Mike, unrelated, what do you think of https://t.co/BT1ublbajF ? — Roy Bahat (@roybahat) April 9, 2016 @roybahatMaybe I'll blog about my thoughts about online environments vs local installs — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) April 9, 2016 @roybahat Agree with this but there are many issues. I'll try to write more later. Now going to see my son in @umgass prod of Pinafore.

Having just concluded almost a quarter century at one job in one place, I've been reflecting on a number of things. What I accomplished, what I've failed to accomplish, highlights, low lights and everything in between. I've also learned a lot over these twenty five years. One thing I learned is DevOps and System Administration. Back around 1993 or 1994 Stuy wasn't really on the internet. Yes, we were able to scam stuy.

SoftDev students are hard at work on their final projects. By now, they all have fairly complex code bases. This limits how much I can help them with debugging. There are some problems, though, that they have to contend with that even with experience, are hard to spot. Notably because the very tools you use to debug these errors are part of the problem. Last week, this happened twice.

Last time we took a look at implementing a Cellular Automaton in NetLogo to do some simple image manipulation. We just scratched the surface. In class, the kids write pretty nice Photoshop Light applications. Today we'll look at some more ambitious problem solving - using a Cellular Automaton to find a path through a maze. Part 1 - finding possible paths We'll use the image above as an example and a live model with all the code is at the end of this post.

We've been using NetLogo in our intro course for years. It's a wonderful programming environment. Many of you recall the Logo programming language. NetLogo is like Logo but instead of programming a turtle, you write a program that's run by multiple, perhaps hundreds of turtles and also by the world the turtles live on. Some of the reasons we like it are that it's: An easy accessible textual programming language Makes building a graphical interface trivial great for modeling Comes with tons of demo models And now, with the latest version, NetLogo programs/models can be deployed as web sites.

The other day, Alfred Thompson put up a piece about coding in multiple languages. Alfred references a post written last May by Rob Underwood. Both pieces are worth a look. Rob is trying to illustrate many of the superficial similarities in popular languages. In the comments on Alfred's blog, both Alfred and I alluded to coding in an appropriate style for the language. For me the issue is even bigger.

I wish our kids believed us when we tell them that we have the same programming troubles as they do. We stare at code for hours not seeing problems that could be a simple as passing the wrong value. We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to see the problem and then realize that we just forgot something silly. At this point, it's common for us CS teachers to tell each other "

The coding on their project is reminiscent in many ways of an Ed Sheerhan song. It left me in tears and very confused as to what the author was trying to accomplish. – a student commenting on their most recent project. We had some fun last week. Well, OK, I had some fun. The SoftDev classes had just finished a little project. Basically, a blogging platform. Something that would tie together all the tools we've been using.