Regular readers of this blog know that I have been doing the New York Times Spelling bee (Computer Science Teacher: Spelling Bee Solver Project). Actually, I do it with my wife who gets most of the words. Anyway, one of the special types of words in the puzzle is called a pangram. Now officially, a pangram is a sentence that includes all of the letters in the alphabet. Anyone who has taken a typing class is probably familiar with this famous pangram. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog In the Spelling bee, a pangram is a single word that includes all of the letters in the puzzle for th ..read more

I used to start a talk on internationalization of code with the question “How many letters are in the alphabet?”  Once I had several people say “26” I would ask “Shouldn’t you ask ‘what alphabet’ first?” I would then discuss some different alphabets and how many more or fewer letters they had. Then briefly mention that not all alphabets look the same. That’s is why ASCII is not good enough. Today I ran across the following graphic. I wish I’d had it back in the classroom. Who knew there were so many diffe3rent scripts? I suspect that are many more not on this list of course. Let’s not fo ..read more

A meme was posted (by Doug Peterson I believe) asking why if the computer knows there is a semi colon missing that the computer doesn’t add it? It’s a good question and I think it gets asked pretty often. The answer is that the computer doesn’t always know where exactly the semi colon belongs. Or if there are other possible answers to the error. Compiler parsers aren’t always helpful as we’d like. There are several parts to most compilers or interpreters. Parsing is the most visible of these parts. Typically, compiler developers seems to spend the most time and effort on the backend part that ..read more

Back to the basics! Get students close to the hardware! Really? Just how much hardware knowledge to students need today? This post was prompted by a post getting some attention in Facebook this weekend. The Decline of Hardware Knowledge in the Era of Cloud Native Compute Now I have been around for a while. I programmed using punch cards and paper tape. I spent some time in an operating system development group where I analyzed crash dumps, wrote code in assembly to traverse stacks and queues to understand what was going on. Great fun. In hindsight anyway. But do high school students need to ge ..read more

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!” --Niels Bohr My track record at looking forward in CS education is a mixed bag. I kept expecting a big jump in internet of things courses and those never developed. Sad really. I think it would be a good idea. I keep predicting growth in cybersecurity courses and the past year seem to show a lot of growth there. Cyber security is getting a lot of press so I see more of these courses in 2023. I hope they are real in-depth courses and not just how to stay safe online. Teacher interested in this should follow the Cybersecurity E ..read more

My wife loves word puzzles. She is amazing at them. Me? Not so much. On the other hand I love programs and programming projects that involved string manipulation. So when my wife started playing a new (to her) word puzzle – the New York Times Spelling Bee – my thoughts went to solving it programmatically. If you are not familiar with the game, it involves seven letters for the player to make words from. Anny of the letters may be used but only letters from the list can be used. Oh, and there is one letter, shown in the center of the letters, that must be used in every word. Words much be four ..read more

One thing that happens when you know who to write computer code is that you know how hard or easy some things are. If you’re even the least OCD some things that are minor, and even unnoticed to many, may bother you a little. Take this image for example. I expect that money amounts will have two digits to the right of the decimal point. You'll notice that the second and third limes have two digits to the right of the decimal point. It turns out that those values will have two digits even if there is only a value for the tenth of a dollar and not the hundredths. So 5.10 for example. The first l ..read more

This looks like a great opportunity to make a difference in CS education. We are seeking community involvement in a new project called Reimagining CS Pathways: High School and Beyond, led by CSTA, CSEdResearch.org, ACM, Code.org, College Board, CSforAll, and the ECEP Alliance. Please consider applying to join us. We particularly need diverse voices from post-secondary as well as industry representation. This project will convene representatives from K-12 ed, higher ed, and industry three times across this school year to develop community definitions of (1) what CS content is essential for all ..read more

Dave Largent, a CS professor at Ball State University, had an important reminder on his blog -Dave's not here, or is he?: Teachers need to struggle to learn (davidlargent.blogspot.com) Our students often (usually?) struggle to learn new things. I think this is especially true in computer science. We as teachers with lots of content knowledge sometimes struggle to be empathetic. We forget our own struggles. One if the things Dave struggled with on his trip through Europe was different languages and customs. It’s a reminder to me that many of our students come from different cultures, customs, a ..read more

I am attending the 2023 CSTA Conference online. I’m not writing blog posts about it the way I normally do. Lots of reasons for that but I will post some learnings from it later. I am downloading lots of presentation slides as notetaking. But I wanted to take a few minutes to ramble about what has been going through my mind as I watch. One question I get a lot is: Why are your as a retired person still attending CSTA conferences and events. It’s a fair question. It's not as if I have a classroom in the fall to apply what I learn. The truth is that the computer science education community has be ..read more