Most Read Posts–April 2011

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the top read blog posts from April 2011. I look at both web statistics and RSS statistics.In some ways I feel like the RSS statistics tell me the most about what is useful for my most regular readers. Although I know that several people who seldom if ever miss my posts (I love you all) read via web browsers many follow using RSS readers of some sort. The web hits come from search engines and in links. The search engine traffic is also very informative. It also lets me know that I am covering topics that people are interested in. Hopefully I am helping. The in links most often come when I get a little opinionated. OK I can live with that. So for what ever it is worth here are the top 10 posts according to RSS statistics as provided by Feedburner.

• Boring is Bad Computer science is interesting! And fun. Even world changing exciting! It should be taught that way.
• US Imagine Cup Finals 2011– Up and Running The first of a number of posts I wrote while at the US Imagine Cup finals in Redmond Washing ton. I will be doing more from the world wide Imagine Cup in New York this summer.
• Books for Computer Science Students Just what it seems. I could use more suggestions still.
• Movies for Computer Science Students The second of three posts that make both lists this month. I made my suggestions against an other list from another web site – link to the other site is there
• Cryptography is Hard Yes it is. But it is fascinating and educational as well. One of my favorite things.
• Computer Science Curricula In Flux The new CS Principles course, updated draft curriculum recommendations from CSTA (have you commented on them yet?), and the CS 2013 project (can more people link to http://cs2013.org/ and help us get found more easily?) and more. Things are happening in computer science curriculum. Since this post I attended a two day meeting at the National Science Foundation that discussed what a first (think pre-AP) computer science course should look like in high school. I hope to blog about that soon.
• Be Careful What You Wish For  Some discussion of the recent bump in enrollment of university computer science and what it could mean if high schools had the same bump. Do we have the teaching capacity?
• After The APCS Exam  The AP Computer Science exam is this week. Earlier in April I posted my suggestions for educational things to do with students after the exam to keep them on task and learning.
• The Internet is the Answer for School Reform – Or Is It My opinion pieces, which this is, tend to do better on the web or search engine traffic than among my regular subscribers. This one seems to have struck a chord though.
• XozGaming–High School Team in the US Imagine Cup I love this story of two high school kids who were completely self taught in XNA game programing and who held their own against college students. They took fourth over a great many college and university teams.

And then there are the posts the analytics tool says are the top posts as read by web browsers. Mostly a different list with a couple the same. If you only read via RSS (which is how I read most blogs) you may have skipped by one of these and find it worth taking a second look.

• Interesting Projects-A Collection A post from March that continued to get a lot of web traffic this month. Search engines or links? I’m not sure but I do think it is a useful post if you are looking for interesting and educational programming projects
• Object Oriented Programming Is Dead – This is another post from March that was heavily linked to. The post it was suggested by seemed to get a lot of attention (much more than mine which is good) and a lot of others linked to this one of mine.
• Microsoft Math 4.0 This post from January received a big boost because of a new in link and the fact that Math 4.0 is now available in a bunch more international languages. Your math people will love this one.
• Books for Computer Science Students The first of a few posts that made both lists.
• How Does Kinect Work This post from last November keeps getting a lot of search engine traffic. Hope they all are looking forward to the Kinect SDK (coming soon) as I am.
• Be Careful What You Wish For An other post that made both lists.
• Movies For Computer Science Students Yea! Three posts on both lists.
• Programming Projects Using Arrays I guess a lot of people are searching for this sort of thing. I would have expected more in the fall during ramp up but if people are finding this post useful I’m happy.
• Fizz Buzz A programming Question Yet another project post that continues to get traffic. All the great replies make it valuable in my opinion.
• Credit Card Project Who knew there were that many people looking for information on parsing credit cards!

What was useful (or useless) to you? What topics should I be looking to research and blog more about? How can I be helpful to you this month?