Eugene Wallingford let me in on A December Adventure  From the website “The December Adventure is low key. The goal is to write a little bit of code every day in December.” It’s sort of like an Advent of Code but not as intense or competitive. I love the idea of the Advent of Code but it’s more work than I want to put into something. On the other hand, I like to idea of spending a bit of time on a new project every day. Of course now I have to come up with and good project idea. I have been working on my Hexapawn game and it is tempting to just work on that a bit more. It still needs work ..read more

An interesting article was shared on Facebook recently -Is the 'Hour of Code' the New 30-Minute Saturday Morning Cartoon Commercial? Take a look at it. It may make you think. One statement there is that "corporate-sponsored Hour of Code tutorials for the nation's schoolchildren have blurred the lines between coding lessons and product infomercials." Well, that is something to think about. Blurred or crossed? Those who know me know that for over nine years I worked for a big tech company supporting computer science educators. So clearly, I think that a lot of "big tech" involvement is a good th ..read more

A presenter at the recent New England CSTA New England Conference mentioned the game Hexapawn.  Hexapawn is hardly new. It was first introduced in 1962. I first ran into it in the early 1970s and found it to be an interesting challenge. One I was to intimidated to try at the the time Be that as it may, the paper introducing Hexapawn used it as something that was open to what we call today machine learning. That is to say, the more one plays it the better the computer gets at playing. The term my professor uses was heuristic programming.. Machine learning is a more accurate term for progra ..read more

I get interesting messages from all sorts of places. Recently, I received this message on LinkedIn. I love the idea of bringing industry professionals in to talk to students. If you’re interested, check out their web  page and use their contact form. I’m a software engineer at Microsoft and a volunteer computer science teacher at Kansas State School for the Blind Outside of work, I’m starting a free initiative to bring guest speakers from the tech industry into high school, community college, or university classrooms or clubs to share their experience and do a q&a. It’s called I ..read more

Got your attention didn’t I? More and more teachers are using online coding environments to teach computer science. I used one myself to teach Advanced Placement Computer Scie3nce Principles. I’m not sure I did the right thing. Let me explain. Recently I attended a panel talk at the CSTA New England conference on what high school teachers could do to better prepare students for university level computer science. Yes, I know that not all of our students will take CS in university but a great many of them will. So what did university people suggest? As with most things, it’s complicated. Apparen ..read more

The tl;dr of it is no. At least not yet. As more and more people use artificial intelligent agents to help write code we’re learning that AI is not quite all there yet. Take this article from CIO magazine Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants It appears that there is still a lot of need for people who know how to code to do debugging and tuning or AI generated code. My former students who are developers tell me that they are using AI quite a bit. And they say it helps them. No one has said they have been replaced by AI yet. Frankly, I don’t see that coming anytime soon. A ..read more

It appears that a lot of people are leaving X (formerly Twitter) I confess to being one of them. Frankly, X isn’t the same for me. A lot of people seem to be moving to BlueSky and I have created an account there. You can find me at @alfredtwo.bsky.social I am trying to get the #CSed hashtag as a popular way to connect with other computer science educators. If you are on BlueSky, I hope you will join me. I am on Threads and Instagram as well ..read more

Today I was able to attend the 2024 CSTA New England conference. There were 14 exhibits at the conference and I spent some time with several of them. One of the images below shows the list of conference sponsors. It was great to see so much support for CS education. GradeThan was one of the firsts booths I visited. They have an online development environment that incorporates Visual Studio Code. I was impressed with the demo I saw. It's worth a look if you are looking for an online IDE. Especially if you are limited to Chrome books. It's not free BTW. imagi was another interesting exhibit. A ..read more

The NCWIT Aspirations in Computing High School Award is an amazing program for young women THe students I have had who earned these awards have found it very useful. And yes, it looks great on a college application. Encourage your students to apply. From the web site: The NCWIT Aspirations in Computing (AiC) High School Award honors 9th - 12th grade women, genderqueer, and non-binary students for their computing-related achievements and interests, and encourages them to pursue their passions. Award recipients are selected based on their aptitude and aspirations in technology and computing, as ..read more

I’m posting this early this year. My thinking is clear so why wait? For many, 2023 was the year that Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT and other tools, really toss a stick in the wheel of CS education. Suddenly students could use an AI to write code for their programming assignments. People were in a tizzy. The CollegeBoard made last minute changes to AP CS Principles and teachers online could talk about little else for a while. Things have calmed down some since earlier in the year but educators are still grappling with what it all means for how there teach. This is true not just in CS of cour ..read more