Friday, October 25, 2019

A Loop By Any Other Name

My first programming language was FORTRAN IV. As I recall we had Do loops. They worked pretty much the same as what we call For loops in most languages today. We didn’t have while loops but we did the same sorts of things with line numbers, if statements, and the powerful but “evil” Go To statement. As time went on I learned more ways of specifying looping constructs including recursion. Recursion took me some time to wrap my head around. Possibly because I used some languages that didn’t even support it back in the day.

These days there are all sorts of iteration loops of various complexity and power. For a software developer that is wonderful. For a teacher? Well, it means you have to make decisions about what to teach. For a one semester, first programming course I like to keep things simple. A C-family For loop has all sorts of possibilities from the simple to some pretty complex structures. Eventually students will learn many of them but I could probably spend half a quarter just on For loops if I tried to get everything possible in and understood. The cognitive load on some possibilities feels like it would be too much for many students.

Mostly I try to focus on the base concepts. A loop has a set up piece. Variables are set to a known starting state. A loop has some sort of comparison it see if it is finished. A counter it checked, a flag is checked, or maybe an interrupt happens. But something has to stop the loop sometime. usually but we can get into those times when an infinite look is useful later. And of course something has to happen that changes the values or states that the loop is checking.

Understanding these concepts will, I sure hope, prepare students for what ever syntax or iteration style they run into over time.

When we teach students for a career rather than just for a job the concepts are much more important than the programming language or the IDE. Concepts – what a concept!

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

How Many Words in That Text?

One of the projects I have used for years is a letter counter program. The idea is to count the occurrences of each individual letter. It’s a nice project that includes arrays, loops, and some string manipulation. This is the sort of thing that does have some real world utility. Cryptography uses word counts to try to crack substitution cyphers. Linguists use it to study languages. And that is just two of what comes to mind.

The next logical (to me anyway) step is to count words. I’ve been thinking about adding this in for a while. It is actually something I was assigned as a project many years ago when I was an undergraduate. It’s not as simple as counting letters. The most obvious method involved counting spaces. What happens if someone is old school and places two spaces after every period? Well, that is something to take into consideration. And what about other white space like tabs or line feeds? Or special characters?

Doug Peterson related in a recent post (About words) that two different programs gave him two different word counts for the same piece of text. The counts were off by 3 on a text of about 486 words. Not a huge percentage but on a book length text that could make a difference. Some articles in magazines are paid by the word. That means getting the count right means money.

Now people can count words with greater accuracy though I don’t want to do it myself. At some point someone is going to feed a lot of data into some artificial intelligence. Long sections of text that have accurate (human counted perhaps) word counts will be fed in and the AI will learn what words are and how to count them. It’s not going to happen until someone decides that developing this is worth the time and money. I wonder if it will be an academic or an industry researcher?

For the time being I think this will make an interesting conversation in class. Maybe we’ll have a contest to see  who can come up with the most accurate algorithm?

Friday, October 11, 2019

What Time Is 30 Minutes From Now?

Got the proctor guide for the PSAT that I have to proctor next week. There is a chart to help proctors determine stop times that are 25, 35, 50, and 60 minutes from a time after the start time hour.

Wait! What? Someone needs a chart to tell them that if the start time is 5 minutes after the hour that 60 minutes later will be 5 minutes after the hour? Apparently someone does. Or someone thinks some one does.

Some of my students, when being told to return to class in a half hour, ask me what time that will be. I blame the analog clock. That and laziness.

So obviously I am wondering, should there be an app for that? Yep, I found a new coding project. Now I just have to decide which class to use it in.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

Michael Backus Alaska Middle School Computer Science Teacher

Every so often I run into a computer science teacher’s work online and ask myself “how have I never heard of this person before?” This week I listened to a podcast by Vicki Davis with a middle school CS teacher from Alaska by the name of Michael Bachus. (How to Make Programming Easier) This guy is doing some cool stuff with middle school students. Robots, artificial intelligence, hardware  and software, and helping a lot of teachers do the same.

Michael Backus teaches computer literacy and computer science at Teeland Middle School in Wasilla, Alaska. As the creator of the http://www.akrobotnerd.com, he has shared many projects that he has developed over the years, the most famous being his Artificial Intelligence with Arduinos curriculum.

Vicki Davis has a lot of great interviews as part of her daily 10 Minute Teacher podcast. She’s had me on a couple of times as well.

In any case, listen to this podcase and check out Michael Backus’ resources. Curriculum, videos, projects, and it looks like a lot more.

Someone needs to get him to CSTA to present some time.

Wednesday, October 02, 2019

ACM/CSTA 2020 Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing

Applications for the ACM/CSTA 2020 Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing are now open. The deadline is 12 January 2020.


The Award

The ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing is a prize designed to recognize talented high school students intending to continue their higher education in the areas of computer science or technology. The program seeks to promote and encourage the field of computer science, as well as to empower young and aspiring learners to pursue computing challenges outside of the traditional classroom environment. The prize is a made available through a $1 million endowment established by David Cutler and Gordon Bell. Dr. Cutler is a software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including Windows NT at Microsoft and RSX-11M, VMS and VAXELN at Digital Equipment Corporation. He is Senior Technical Fellow at Microsoft. Dr. Bell is an electrical engineer and an early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation where he led the development of VAX. He is now a researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research. Up to four winners will be selected annually and each will be awarded a $10,000 prize which will be administered through the financial aid department at the university the student will attend.

Eligibility

To apply for the Cutler-Bell Prize, you must be a graduating high school senior residing and attending school in the U.S. Challenges for the award will focus on developing an artifact that engages modern computing technology and computer science. Judges will look for submissions that demonstrate ingenuity, complexity, relevancy, originality, and a desire to further computer science as a discipline.

Tuesday, October 01, 2019

2019 Champions of Computer Science Awards

Know a student or teacher or administrator who has achieved something this year to increase access and quality of CS education. I can think of a number of people who should be nominated. Maybe you can think of someone as well? Don’t assume they will nominate themselves! Deadline is midnight Pacific Time October 21, 2019.

2019 Champions of Computer Science Awards

The Award

Tell us about a student, educator, administrator, or organization that has achieved something in computer science this past year for the opportunity to be recognized as a 2019 Champion of Computer Science. These awards are a collaboration between CSTA and Code.org.

The Champions of Computer Science Awards identify and promote students, teachers, administrators, and organizations who have made a significant impact to improve access to and the quality of CS education.

Eligibility

Any K-12 student, teacher, or administrator may be nominated for the Champions of CS Awards. Organizations that work directly to improve access to and the quality of CS education may also be nominated (examples: afterschool coding clubs, local CSTA chapters, regional or national nonprofits, etc.).

Nominations

Award winners and a guest of choice will receive an all-expenses paid trip (travel and hotel) to attend the CSEdWeek event on December 9th (location to be confirmed). This opportunity is only available for US submissions.

This form closes Monday, October 21, 2019 at midnight PT. Email awards@csteachers.org if you have questions.