Define Learn To Code

I saw an interesting question today on Twitter:

Hey coding enthusiasts! In your opinion, what's the best laptop for students to learn how to code on? #edchat #edtechchat #pdchat

— Mary Jo Madda (@MJMadda) September 30, 2021

My first response is that there is no definitive answer to that question. I thought about it for a while. One can learn to program by hooking a Raspberry Pi to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and firing up Thonny and learn Python. One can use any number of online IDEs and a Chrome book. The last classes I taught had a mix of students running Eclipse and Processing on Mac and PC laptops with no appreciable difference. In short, does the computer even matter?

Maybe there is a question that has to be asked and answered before discussing the right or best laptop to use. That question is “what does it mean to “learn how to code?” I suspect we could have quite a long discussion on that question alone.

To me it boils down to:

• What problem are you trying to solve – how do you define “learning to code”
• What software helps you best learn to code by your definition
• What hardware runs the software you want to run

Picking the hardware should almost always be the last thing one picks. Now I have to go think about what it means to “learn how to code.”

Phun With Phone Numbers

Among the programming projects I ran into recently was one to calculate all of the combinations of letters one could make from a phone number. Companies do this sort of thing all the time. They generate the combinations and then look for words related to their business so they can use it as a mnemonic and help people remember their phone number. Probably a bigger deal before domain names than now but still useful.

How many possible combinations are there? Well, that depends. It can be a low or 2187 (3 to the 7th power) and a high of 16384 (4 to the 7th power). The highest number is for phone numbers with all 7s and/or 9s.

I’m trying to write small bits of code to keep my mind active and solving interesting (to me) little programs. Initially I didn’t care to write this program (though eventually I did) so was thinking around the problem from other directions. What if I took a word and had a program generate a phone number? That was fun. And pretty easy. So I thought about the logical (to me anyway) next step. What if I had a list of 7 letter words and generated a file with the phone numbers that matched each word?

It turns out I have a small word list with just under 114,000 words in it. Step one was building a new file with only the seven letter words in it. A nice little project that is simple even for beginners.

I borrowed the code from the earlier program that turned a word into a number. A handy thing that shows the value of methods and reusable code. I used that to create the file with a list of seven letter words and phone numbers. A list of just over 22,000 for what its worth.

When I did write the program to create all the possible combinations of characters for a phone number I had a nice data file to use to check my work. That was surprisingly helpful.

Anyone out there assigning the program to create all the combinations of letters for a phone number? What interesting solutions are students coming up with?

An AI Tutor for CS Education

Recently I came across a Microsoft Research project called AI for Programming Education. The project “goal is to build a personalized and autonomous intelligent teaching assistant (an AI Tutor) for programming education, enabling on-demand education.”

It’s an intriguing and I think ambiguous idea. I tend to be skeptical of AI tutors as a general idea. A half dozen years or so ago I attended a workshop at Microsoft Research dealing with hinting systems. In other words, how can the computer give hints to beginners. I wrote about hinting systems and the workshop here.

The tl;dr is that it is a hard problem. No surprise to teachers of course. Knowing when to hint and how much to hint is a tough problem for human teachers. For a computer AI it is going to be harder still. That’s just one part of what an AI tutor would have to be able to do.

I don’t know any more about the project than what I read on the web page (link above) and that they are looking for a CS Education researcher to help with pedagogy. CS Education/Pedagogy Research Internship Opportunity at Microsoft (AI-driven Program Synthesis in the PROSE team) That is an encouraging move.

With more and more of education moving to the cloud, more and more online curriculum being developed, and systems that are getting smarter about helping programmers to write code (IntelliCode Completion In Visual Studio (Preview) 2022), creating an AI tutor seems like a logical project to take on. I assume papers will be published. I look forward to reading more about this project over time.

Book Review–System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot is what you get when a top philosopher, a top political scientist, and a top computer scientist get together to think deeply about technology and society and write a book.  It’s not a book for just one group. It’s not a dry textbook or academic paper but a clearly written explanation of the issues. It’s a book for everyone.

The book talks a lot about both artificial intelligence and social computing which are more connected to each other than may be obvious at times. The social and political impacts of these topics and others are covered in a clear and understandable way without hyperbola, scaremongering, or blatant cheerleading. This is one more thing that makes it stand out from many other books on these topics.

Yes, there are parts that are scary. Yes, there are parts that are optimistic. All in all though it is as fair and open minded a book as one can get. The book askes questions that have to be asked. There is enough data and sets of facts to give one a lot to think about. In fact, I found several times that I had to put the book down to think about what I had read. It’s that sort of book.

Were I teaching Advanced Placement Computer Science today, especially Principles but also APCS A, I would assign reading from it and have class discussions. If I could not get a class set I would at least have some copies in the library put on reserve. But I’d really like my students to read it all.

This is a book that should be on some required reading lists. Computer scientists really do need to think about the “should we do this” question as much as the “can we do this” question. This is the book to start thinking that way. But policymakers need this books as well. So do business people. So give it to the polysci and business majors you know.  A lot of social scientists should read it as well – sociology, psychology, social work. Probably more. It will help one understand what people are dealing with in today’s world.

Technology is impacting society, and our democracy, in many ways. Some are obvious and some are not. If we want to have a civil society we need to think deeply about the impact of technology on individuals and organizations This book is a great way to start.

Debugging–Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast

Mike Zamansky had an interesting post called  What They Used To Know that got me thinking about the old days. Now Mike is a youngster and didn’t really start in computers until the 1980s.  I started in the 1970s with punch cards and batch processing. That meant that there was no instant gratification seeing your program run.

With batch, one handed their cards to an operator and some time later, hours or maybe a day, one got their cards back with a listing that showed the results. Results usually meaning a list of errors that kept the program from running.

Desk checking, studying the listing and trying to fix as many errors as possible before trying again was a bit of an art form. To this day I will often print out a program to look at the big picture in a way that still doesn’t feel effective on a screen. It’s tempting to see that as a way to go – limited opportunities to have the computer check ones code.

There are downsides to this sort of thing though. Specifically, having limited runs or at least long waits between runs encourages writing large amounts of code at a time and discourages writing and testing small pieces of code regularly.

Being able to hit “compile” every other minute though tends to encourage, or at least support, the beginner tendency to “throw some code in and see what happens.” This wastes time in the long run and often leads to ugly, hard to maintain, and inefficient code.

The military has a saying that “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” that some what applies. Slowing down to really analyze code, think smoothly, generally leads to a faster result. Tossing code in on a wing and a prayer is not smooth but chaotic. Slowing down to really look at what is happening is smooth and looks slow to the casual viewer but leads to faster results.

As I was thinking tonight and asking, “what if we limited people to some limited number of compiles a day?” It seemed like a good idea until I thought of the possible problems. That’s when I realized that external controls on speed are not the answer. Rather the answer is for developers to regulate themselves. To slow down and focus in ordered to make faster progress.

Some Simple Early Programming Projects

If you are not on Twitter you may be missing a lot of good things. For example, the other day Kelly Lougheed (@kellylougheed ) tweeted out a bunch of simple labs that only require user input and mathematical operations. I have copied them below because I want to be able to find them again later.

I’ve used unit conversion for years but it gets old. Fahrenheit to Celsius, miles to kilometers, grams to tons, you get the idea. It gets boring. Kelly has some great ideas. There is an idea from Neil Plotnick (@NeilPlotnick)  below Kelly’s ideas.

Have any more? Add them to the comments for future readers! And be sure to follow @kellylougheed and @NeilPlotnick on Twitter.

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Kelly Lougheed (@kellylougheed )

Programming activities that involve ONLY user input and mathematical operations:

• Program to calculate the tip
• Program to calculate cost per person when dining out
• Program to convert units (made-up units like Harry Potter currency okay) What else?

Also just wrote this silly lab where the user can input their age and be told their future in 10/20/30 years ("When you are X years old, you will retire to a desert island", etc.)

0.3 Fortune Teller Lab

Fortune Teller Lab Directions: Where do you see yourself in 10 years? Have the user type in their age, and tell them their future at various ages (which you calculate by adding years to their current…

docs.google.com

And for extensions, I love little math challenges that involve Ss printing out the result of mathematical expressions (getting practice with operators!). For example, there is the Four 4's Challenge, and also this 1996 Challenge:

0.3 1996 Lab

1996 Lab Directions: Use the numerals 1, 9, 9 and 6 exactly in that order to make a mathematical expression that prints the following numbers: 28, 32, 35, 38, 72, 73, 76, 77, 100 and 1000. You can…

docs.google.com

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Neil Plotnick replying to @kellylougheed

I have my students code algebra equations like the distance formula. Also stuff for geometry such as area and volume measurements. Ohms law for physics. Ideal gas laws in chemistry.

Are You Assigning Projects or Recipes?

Chris Lehmann, the amazing principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia,  says “If you assign a project and get back 30 of the same thing, that’s not a project, that is a recipe.”  Now recipes have their place for sure.  They often make a good start. I see programming as a creative thing (art/craft/skill/science/what ever) and I want to see creativity from my students.

For me this starts with day one. In my introduction to my classes I tell students that I want to see creativity. I want them to make projects their own. This can be a difficult thing for some students. There are teachers out there who do want to see the same thing from every student. It makes things easy to grade I guess. Or something.

Very often in early projects is is hard to be creative. There are only so many ways to calculate degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius. On the other hand you can ask students to find two measurements they like and convert one of them to the other. You’ll be amazed at the combinations students come up with. Sure you’ll get the simple conversion using degrees Kelvin but someone will do miles to furlongs.

Even simple programs can get creative with tools that make graphics easy. C# and Visual Basic both have the Windows Forms libraries to use but Processing can make using Java or Python colorful and graphic as well. To say nothing of a lot of block programming systems.

Of course, students getting bogged down in how a program looks can be an issue at times but that can be dealt with though conversation.

An even better way is often letting students choose their own projects. I always finish up a semester with a larger project that students select themselves. Student get very creative with those projects. The Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles course requires a Create project which serves a similar purpose.

For smaller projects it can take a bit more to encourage creativity. After all if there is known input and expected output that’s going to be the same. Here is where you want students to be creative in their code. Let students decide if they want to use a for loop, a while loop, or even a foreach loop. Decision structures can also be done in different ways. Having students turn in code that looks different is a great learning/teaching opportunity. I love showing students the different solutions that students turn in. This both encourages them to try to be different and lets them see different solutions. The idea is to open their minds to looking at problems in different ways.

The most important thing is to encourage creativity. Celebrate it!