The StuyCS Family mailing list was host to an interesting discussion today. One of our younger members asked if the practice of giving technical problems during an interview was going to follow him throughout his career or if it goes away for more senior applicants. An interesting discussion followed. It reminded me of a time I was talking to a few senior engineers at a large tech company. A couple of younger engineers were with us along with a new hire.

Scale, scale, scale. Scripted lessons. Online resources, Moocs. No excuses schools. All of these are modern trends in education. None of these are about good education. It's really demoralizing reading article after article devaluing true master teachers and real education. So, last night was a real pleasure. I attended a talk, given by Alan Alda on communicating science. The talk was sponsored by The Academy for Teachers. I grew up watching Hawkeye on MASH and more recently Arnold Vinick on The West Wing but Mr.

Just had an interesting conversation with Chris, one of our CSTUY mentors. Chris is working with one of our more advanced groups of hackers - they'll be creating a web based app that with ultimately be deployed as mobile using PhoneGap. The question he had was "Angular.js or Backbone.js." Chris and I have had this conversation before. I was explaining at the time why I preferred to use Backbone.

The other day codehs made an announcement about their new autograder. Fellow CS Teaching veteran Alfred Thompson had his say up on his blog where he talked about Mark Guzdial's comment on autograders leading to less creative assignments. I very much agree that autograders, due to their rigidness lend themselves to less creative projects, but thought I'd write up a few of my own thoughts on autograders. First and foremost, I HATE GRADING.

We talked about setting kids up to fail in math. What about CS? Well, it's a little subtler. I started thinking about this after a conversation with one of my graduates about Harvard's famous CS50. Since that conversation, I've spoken to a number of my kids that have gone through CS50 and most seem to say the same things: They don't really teach anything The kids rely on a group member who already knows stuff or will learn all the stuff on their own If it weren't for my StuyCS background my group would have really struggled.

Back in April, I was at the second annual "Dream It, Code It, Win It!" awards. Some of our kids had submitted work and were selected as awardees in the high school division. It was great to see Jack and David Cahn there. Jack and David were both members of winning high school teams last year and they were back as college winners this time around. It was great to see them.

The StuyCS Semi Formal, Clyde "Thluffy" Sinclair, and other assorted silliness - one of the reasons StuyCS is a family is that we try to have fun. Jazz Hands day was the latest. I got the idea at JonAlf's wedding. The wait staff were all wearing white gloves - all of a sudden it hit me - Jazz Hands!!!! and Jazz Hands day was born. The idea: All of our Junior and Senior CS students, around 350 or so, along with their teachers would wear white gloves on a specified day.

When starting the spring semester, students are frequently a little rusty. They just had a high intensity month of study, tests, and projects. That was followed by a week of nothing. I like to start with something lightweight that gets them coding again and ramps them up to speed. In SoftDev I started with a brief overview of the HTML5 canvas and then gave them a small homework assignment to do something fun.

Yesterday, I took part in a round table discussion on Ed Tech and Tech Ed, the latter being more, as they say, my wheelhouse. Afterwards a few of us were chatting and a friend observed that when she first started to talk to high school kids she was shocked that they really didn't know the local tech players - neither names nor companies. A couple of years ago, another friend was helping me organize an event for high schoolers.

I'm getting ready for my AP classes this morning. We're building a word search generator and we're at the point where we need to read a list of words from a file First, I'd better make sure I can do it. We're using the java scanner, mostly because it's easy. First cut: public class wl { public static void main(String[] args) { Scanner sc = new Scanner(new File("words")); while (sc.