Artificial Intelligence and Making Bread

One of the things I have been doing since retiring is baking bread. I love some fresh bread and I want to avoid artificial ingredients in my food. That doesn’t mean I feel the need for a little artificial help in the process. Enter bread machines. Right now I have two machines I am using.

The machine on the right does the whole thing. I put in the ingredients, set a few settings, press start and in a few hours I have a loaf of baked bread. It’s not a particularly smart machine. It’s mostly some steps on a set of timers.

It does a pretty good job but its limited. The bread is a simple boxy shape but it makes for reasonable sandwiches. It doesn’t do sourdough bread and it doesn’t do anything but a standard boxy loaf of bread.

The machine on the left is called the sourdough sidekick and all it does is manage sourdough starter. That leaves a lot of work for the baker, me, to do to bake bread but it gives me a lot of options. This machine is smarter though.

Managing sourdough requires some maintenance work that I have no interest in doing. Some people name their starter and treat it almost like a pet. I have no interest in that. So the sourdough sidekick handles the part of sourdough that I am not interested in doing so I can focus on the parts I am interesting in doing.

SO what is smart about it? Well, I can tell it how much starter I want and when I want it and it will feed and careful the starter I have in order to have it ready for me. It has to balance water, flour, and temperature for me. There is an app that lets me monitor the process.

This does what I want from AI. It handles the boring part and lets me do the hands on and creative parts that I enjoy doing. The first machine gives me bread but does so in a rather boring fashion. If all food was to me was fuel that would be fine. But there is an art to food as well. There is some creativity involved. The hands on aspect of working the dough gives me a certain satisfaction.

What I want from AI is not to replace the things I like to do but to enable me to do things that I like to do. The sidekick has made baking sourdough more doable for me by taking care of the work I don’t have time and interest to do.

I feel like a lot of AI usage is mostly about replacing people when what I want it to do is enable people. I’ve read several people saying things like they don’t want AI to create art or music but rather do the laundry and house keeping so that they have time to create art or music..

I can understand how companies want to replace people and save money. I think that many of us would rather see AI saving time to enable people. Much of what regular people want AI to do requires hardware like my sourdough Sidekick. It seems like the people behind artificial intelligence are only interested in software modulinos though.  Hardware is hard.

We’re seeing more and more pushback against AI. I believe that is largely because of the use cases it is being promoted for. We really need to combine hardware and software to solve problems that make it hard for people to do they things they want to do.

Who Is Driving Changes to Computer Science Education

There are a lot of Changes happening at code dot org The Slashdot article linked there lists several of them. While the changes include a number of people changes including President Cameron Wilson stepping aside, Chief Academic Officer Pat Yongpradit leaving to join Microsoft, and some staff layoffs the change in direction, to AI, may be the most concerning. From Hour of Code to Hour of AI? Some interesting comments follow that post.

The questions top of my mind are "who is driving the direction of CS education" and "is CS education moving in the right direction?" A lot of people believe that industry is pushing CS education in the direction of being vocational. The new focus on Artificial Intelligence often feels like a vocational direction.

My involvement with computer science education predates code.org and even CSTA so I have seen a lot of changes. In my first teaching days computer science teachers were pretty isolated. There was SIGCSE which accepted K12 teachers though welcomed sometimes felt like aspirational rather than actual. ACM, of which SIGCSE was and is still a part, was doing some support for CS education. Cameron Wilson was a huge part of that and worked policy.

CSTA was developed by some wonderful people in and around ACM. This started the real movement towards expanding K12 CS education. CSTA helped train and organize teachers to push for more more CS education. Code,org came a bit later and brought something new to the effort.

Code.org brought money and industrial production values. From the first set of videos that went viral to some very good curriculum resources as well as connections to industry and political leaders. Getting policymakers to push for CS education stepped up.

We’ve come a long way.

Coming back to my earlier questions. Is industry driving the directions that CS education is moving? A lot of people think they are. Industry has money and it has funded a lot of the work by code.org and CSTA. The modern Golden Rule is that the people with the gold make the rules after all.

Industry has some motivation here. I spent a few years working at Microsoft myself where my job was to promote the use of Microsoft tools for teaching. I didn’t get much in the direction of what to teach. I always felt that teachers should decide what to teach and I just wanted to help teachers find ways to use tools to teach those concepts. Teaching computer science as vocation was always there though. Senior mangers often told me that industry needed more people to know CS because there were jobs that needed to be filled.

CS as vocation has always been a selling point for CS education of course. It’s what helped sell school boards and other elected officials. Among teachers that was usually a secondary motivation. For a lot of teachers, including me over time, CS education became more about understanding how the world works. We don;t teach physics because we want to make more physicist. We teach it so that students understand the world around them.

People who are not working for tech companies often have to use computers and make decisions about computing. From spreadsheets to databases to internet searches. And now AI. People in all walks of life use computers. Understanding computer science can make those people more efficient. Computers are an important part of our world.

It seems like all the big tech companies are betting huge sums of money on AI. There is a lot of pressure to move the direction of CS education into AI. Is the industry push vocational in intent? Is is all about helping these companies to make money? CSTA and code.org are both pushing AI these days. Is this because of industry (gold making the rules?) or would it be happening independently?

That leads to the second question – are we moving in the right direction? I think that question may be different for K12 and for university. Personally, I still think CS education in K12 should be about understanding and not vocational. Someone else can address higher education but K12 should be about preparation for life and not for vocation at least in comprehensive schools.

So is AI the right direction? I think it is indisputable that AI is important to learn. Students should learn prompting and they should learn what AI can and cannot do, They should also learn how to think about what AI should not do. They need to know something about how AI works and that is core computer science.

I think that computer science, in the old analogy, is the dog and AI is the tail. The tail should not wag the dog. Making AI the focus at the expense of basic  computer science would be a huge mistake. We do have to teach the basics that make AI possible. Students need to understand where AI comes from and where it might go. Understanding code is an essential part of that understanding.  There is always going to be more to CS than just AI. We didn’t stop teaching arithmetic when calculators were invented. We should not assume that AI code writers mean we don’t have to stop teaching basic computer science.

CS in K12 should not be just vocational. Is industry driving CS education? I fear they may be. Are we moving in the wrong direction? Maybe. If so, it will be up to educators to provide some course correction. 

H1B AI and the Future of Computer Science education

H1B visas are back in the news these days. One one hand we have some loud calls for more H1B visas with a claim that US native workers are not up to snuff. Or at least that there are not enough good ones locally. On the other hand, people claim that well qualified Americans are losing out because foreign workers are taking jobs at lower pay. That the call for H1Bs is all about saving money. Amidst all of this, American students are wondering about future jobs for them between artificial intelligence and H1B workers taking all the jobs.

H1B and both hiring and salaries are actually more complicated than many think. Some claim that H1B workers work for less but the law and most hiring companies payH1B workers and natives the same salaries.Plus it can be hard to hire H1B workers because of government rules and paperwork.

On the other hand, supply and demand are involved. If H1B workers increase supply than salaries may be lower for everyone. My friends and contacts in the software industry complain that there is an over abundances of programmers and that the need is dropping because of AI. Other industries may very well be different. I just don't know.

From what I have read a majority of H1B visas these days do got to software developers. Are Musk and Ramaswamy talking about a need for other types of engineers? Are we facing a shortage of other engineers? I don’t know but I will focus on computer/software types because that is where my expertise rests.

Some of that Musk and especially Ramaswamy are saying is that US student don’t work hard enough and that the US educational system is not helping. Leaving aside that many of the people who agree with them want to cut funding for education and make the system worse aside, what is happening.

I have taught a number of international students over the years. These students generally do work harder and show more respect for teachers and for learning. Ramaswamy is not totally wrong on that. The students I have had are not typical in many ways from their peers in their home countries. I would hesitate to extrapolate to what goes on in those countries. Lets face it, it takes a very motivated and privileged student to go study in another country.

Priorities are a bit off in some respects in American education though. Look at how many states where the highest paid public employee is a college football or basketball coach. In other countries sports and school are not as connected as in the US. How often to athletes get special treatment in American schools and college admission! And yet, students come to the US from all over the world to study at American universities. Clearly, we’re doing some things right.

Cost of higher ed is a turn off and a burden for many. Universities are spending money on some non-academic things to attract students which adds to the cost. That is in part, I think, because the US has cut funding that could help students get a good education. People forget that the greatest growth in the economy came from GIs getting free tuition after WW II. Reducing government funding of higher ed is a direct cause IMHO, for a perceived need for H1B workers. If Musk and Ramaswamy think there are problems with US education spending more money IS the answer.

What does this mean for American students? Well, for starters it means they need to do more to prove themselves. Years ago I was working for Microsoft on a competition called the Imagine Cup. International students took to it and worked their tails off. American students, especially those at top universities, said that there wasn’t enough prize money to make it worth their while. A degree from a name university was all they needed. They saw no need to try to prove themselves. Those days are gone! And good riddance.

A student today who wants a career in software or related fields can get it but they should not expect it to be handed to them. The evidence companies are looking for are not grades or what university you attended but actual evidence of accomplishment. A solid portfolio in GitHub for example. Or projects completed in an internship or working to help a non profit. Or perhaps building out systems for a small business. What did you do outside of classwork?

High school students work very hard to get into universities. They research what universities are looking for and they build impressive resumes. Too often they coast once getting into university. Oh sure, the academics can be hard and they have to work at it. But universities have all sorts of support for students once they get into the university. It is tempting to think that university is about having a good time before being handed a good job. That is the mentality that hurts students.

Can American students have a good career in computing in spite of AI and H1B visas? Absolutely, but they cannot take it for granted.

Three Keys To Being A Great Teacher

For the last 20 years or so I have been able to meet some truly great teachers. Some I visited in their schools. Some I met at conferences. Some I have become good friends with. I have concluded that there are three things that make good teachers into great teachers.

One: Relationships with students. Great teachers truly care about their students as people. They build relationships with students. They may not be close to all of them but they try to build relationships with as many as they can. They listen to students. It’s not about the struggles the student is having with the subject, thought that is important. They hear about the students struggles with life, with other subjects, and with what happens today. They respect students as people. Students feel that the teacher likes them because the teacher does like them. That is what lets them build a relationship.

Two: They are enthusiastic about the subject or subjects they teach. This can be difficult in elementary school where teachers have to teach a lot of different subjects.  Great teachers can fake it to some extent because they are passionate about enough of what they are teaching to know what that feels like. Passion is contagious. It also means that one wants to share that passion as well as the specific knowledge they are trying to share.  Students who have a relationship with a teacher will naturally want to learn what is being taught so enthusiastically.

Three: Innovation. A superintendent of schools once told me that there is a difference between a teacher with one year of experience 20 times and a teacher with 20 years of experience. The great teachers I have met are constantly innovating They may start with a canned curriculum, though rarely, but if they do they make it their own. They add, subtract, and move things around. More often though, they make their own curriculum. Oh, sure, they abide by necessary standards but they teach their own way. They are rarely satisfied. You’ll find a great teacher modifying their presentation, their project, anything, before teaching that material again. They often make up their own courses and adapt them to meet the needs of the students in front of them. And the times in which they live.

They also borrow from other great teachers. They are not afraid to find ideas from others and fit them into how and where they teach. These are the teachers you find at conferences. They are presenting but they are also there learning. If they present at a conference or PD session they welcome feedback and new ideas. They are talking to others in the “hallway track”, sharing meals and activities outside the conference. They are always listening and learning.

Bonus: The great teachers share their knowledge with others. They will share their curriculum. They will present at conferences. They share not for ego but because there is something about being a teacher that just makes one want to help everyone become better. Better about teaching. Better at knowing things.

Seek out the great teachers. Become a great teacher.  Make the world a better place. Make that part of your New Year’s Resolution.

Do You Remember Struggling to Learn?

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, and languages. It’s a good reminder that examples in American culture and English can add to the struggle. Being aware of where our students come from is important.

I often shared my own story of my first computer class. Greatly did I struggle in that first class. The first couple of projects were only completed with a lot of help from peers and TAs. Things came easier eventually and with a solid and broad base (I have been programming for 51 years now) most new topics are easier. But not always. Having those struggles is character building. And helps develop empathy.

I think that having new experiences that involve struggle to learn is a valuable experience for teachers (anyone really). It also helps us model life long learning for extra value. I encourage everyone to seek out learning experiences that do not come easy.

And above all, remember that our students struggle and we need to be patient with them and support them. Have a great school year!

What Jobs Are Safe From Automation?

“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra

That doesn't mean people don't try. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have a lot of people predicting what jobs are an are not likely to be replaced by computers. Technology is challenging the ideas about what jobs can and cannot be replaced by technology. Doug Peterson, who shares a lot of interesting articles, recently share this one predicting that leaders will not be replace. It's an optimistic article. 5 Reasons Leaders Shouldn't Worry That Generative A.I. Will Take Their Jobs | Inc.com

A lot of jobs we once thought were completely safe are being seen in a new way lately. AIs are creating what looks to many like art for example. This is forcing us to take a hard look at how we define art. Some recent visits to museums had me already asking “what is art?”

Today we joke about AI attempts to write short stories, poetry, and other narratives. A lot of our stories in movies an even books are formulaic. How long before AIs can write Hallmark Christmas movies I wonder? What used to be a joke may be a prediction of the future.

A lot of people are speculating on  the future end of the programmer profession. People have been predicting that would decades but we are closer to that than ever before. Software developers today think they are safe though because they (we) know that end users are terrible about describing what they want a program to do. Will the future bring courses and training on how to talk to AIs? Possibly. I can sure see the need for it.

People who are not teachers are suggesting that AIs will take over for human teachers. As someone who spent 15 years teaching I am not so sure about that. I think the human touch will remain important for the future. Teaching is a lot about reading people and establishing relationships. Wil AI be able to do that? I am not sure anyone knows.

One area I think people have an advantage over AI is that we are bad with risk analysis. What may seem like a flaw leads people with some luck, some imagination, and some hard work to beat the odds. We see potential needs when a pure look at the data would not see anything. And we are often willing to defy the odds for things we believe in. I am not sure AI will get there.

Thinking about the possibilities of AI and what it means for the future of work is a critical topic. It’s something we need everyone, but especially students, to be thinking about.

Adventures in Taking Code From the Internet

Facebook memories remined me that ten years ago I was thinking about writing a program that would ring bells (nautical time) on the hour and half hour. I didn't write it back then. Probably because I was busy with my day job. It got me thinking about writing one now just for the fun of it.

Now I have written a fancy clock program before. It looks something like this.

That was written in Visual Basic and I really wanted to use C#. Besides that, that program is a bit busy for something as simple as I wanted to write. The Timer and DateTime classes in the .NET Framework make writing a simple clock application very easy. I thought I would take a look on the internet to see what code samples I could find. There are plenty of them. I found several interesting looking samples that also drew analog clock faces.

The first one I found (C# Analog Clock Program (thecrazyprogrammer.com)) looked simple enough so I created a project and copied the code into it. It was broken. Looking back at the comments on the original post I found a number of comments saying the codebase broken. None of them had answers.

That seems to be pretty common. No doubt that things worked fine for the original coder but something was lost in the posting. I suspect that most people who come across this sort of thing are beginners which would explain the questions. Having a bit more experience I quickly fixed the errors I had and got the program to work. It didn’t look quite like I wanted but again, having enough knowledge to understand the code without a lot of comments, I made some adjustments and got it looking the way I waned.  I suspect that many beginners would either life with it or try a whole lot of things until they stumbled on the right combination. Or maybe broke the program beyond fixing.

That highlights one of the big issues with beginners taking code from the internet. Without some real knowledge even minor issues will keep success away from the student.

I found a second project that was put on the internet some years after the first one I found. Interestingly enough, it appeared to be a refactoring and modest improvement over the first one I found. The code was nearly identical. No credit was given to a previous coder. In fact it was so close that I copied a snippet and pasted into the earlier project. With a tiny edit (a name change) it worked perfictly. This is what I wound up with.

The Code Project web site has a variety of analog clock code samples. I took at look at one - Analog clock control in C# – CodeProject that was pretty good. and worked more or less right off the bat. Except that is was written in a much older version of Visual Studio than I was using. (2003 compared to 2022). An upgrade was required with Visual Studio handled pretty well. That is not always the case if coders used depreciated or removed features or changed names. Yet another issue with taking code from the internet.

Well, now I have a couple of code samples to play with. Most of all I am more convinced that actually getting code from the internet to work can be more complicated than many would think it is.

Now to think about ringing bells. Which reminds me of one last story,

Back when I was in college during the mini-computer era we had a lab full of ASR-33s. They had actual bells that were hit with a little hammer. One student wrote a program that ran in the background of the computer and "grabbed" control of each terminal as it became available. Then it would start ringing all the bells at once. It so happens that when it ran the only one in the lab was the computer department secretary.

The department chair held a meeting with all the TAs and it never happened again.

Coding It Yourself Can Be Fun

Every couple of weeks I bake a couple of loaves of bread. The bread mostly gets used for breakfast sandwiches. Now my bread does not look as perfect as what I could get in a bakery. And the bagels? Once in a while I try my hand at bagels, don’t look anything close to what I get at my favorite bagel place. But they all taste good and I find it very satisfying to make it myself.

Coding can be a bit the same. Not everyone writes professional looking (or performing) code but sometimes there is some satisfaction in having a program that works just they way you want it to and does just what you need. Maybe it is not “release to the public” neat and tidy. It may be what we used to call a “programmers program.” In other words, a program that only the programmer who write it could (or would) use. My Wordle solver helper program is one such. It works great – for me. It doesn’t have the error checking a released program should have. And maybe it should start at one and not zero. But it works great for me.

Programming is basically stating a process or method using computer code. My Wordle solver represents my thinking of how I think Wordle could be solved. It was fun to write and is fun to use. It’s not ready for prime time though. Does that make it a bad program? No more than my imperfect bread or bagels are bad. They both meet my needs and that, for me, for these, is all that matters.

In some ways, that is the message we may want to pass on to students. Many, perhaps most, of our students will not become professional software developers. They may still write code for their own tasks or interests though. We need to help them enjoy that experience. One way to do this is to assign projects that are interesting to the student. Open ended projects are good for this but even better is letting students select their own projects.

For semester ending projects, I used to allow students to select from a list of suggested projects and also to have the option to design their own projects (after discussion with the teacher) that solved a problem that they were interested in solving.  Helping students find the fun and satisfaction in solving an assignment promotes their learning. And, I hope, helps them think of computer science as worth doing for themselves.

A Summary Look Back at #CSTA2022

CSTA 2022 was energizing! After three years of not seeing people in person it was awesome to reconnect with people. And to meet new people. The energy level was high through the whole event. Masks and proof of vaccination were required which I thought was great. It seemed to work out well at SIGCSE. Quite frankly, after lots of stories' of people getting COVID at ISTE which did not have those requirements I really apricated the carefulness of CSTA.

Masks did make it harder to recognize people. I’m glad I wore my trademark hat which one person told me was more famous than I am.

Sessions were very good as one expects. The exhibit hall had about 75 exhibitors and everyone was staffed by engaged, knowable, and upbeat people. The hallway track was really fun. I learned a lot from friends old and new in discussions. As I understand it there were about 1,700 people in attendance for everyone to talk to.

The venue, McCormick Place was huge. It needed to be to all all of the concurrent sessions. We only took up a small part of the place though. If you explored to far you could easily get lost. And I did. There was food available for purchase in the back of the exhibit hall. It wasn't bad. It was nice not to have to go far and wide to search for food. There were many good places to eat nearby however. I liked that I could get from the conference hotel to the conference without going outside. Especially the day it rained all day.

A good number of people approached me to say that they read and value this blog and/or my Twitter feed. I can't tell you how much that means to me. Thank you to all of you. You made CSTA extra special.

It looks like next year’s CSTA will be virtual. Sigh. I know that it will make it possible for a lot of people who can’t travel to an in-person conference to get valuable knowledge from sessions. A virtual exhibit hall doesn’t excite me though. And I will miss the hallway conversations. On the other hand, maybe we can have even more sessions and have them available to more people.

My previous posts on CSTA 2022

• Day One #CSTA2022
• Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft at #CSTA2022
• My Day Two at #CSTA2022
• My Day Three at #CSTA2022
• My Day Four at #CSTA2022

Final Thoughts on SIGCSE 2022

I had a great time at SIGCSE 2022. As an introvert I probably suffered less from not being with people than many but after two years I really needed to be with people. I was able to connect in-person with friends I had not seen in years. Some a decade or more. That was truly awesome. The community building of an in-person conference should not be understated.

I had some great “hallway track” conversations. This is not nearly as easy in a remote conference and it contributed to what I was learning. Besides being with people I really did want to learn. So my hallway conversations were not all catching up with friends. I was able to ask a lot of questions about the work various people were doing. Things often outside the scope of a specific talk or panel that I attended.

I visited with Ruthe Farmer of the Last Mile Fund. The Last Mile fund is “investing in a broader group of students already committed to technology and engineering fields, providing support for challenges they face beyond their control, and incubating them to be the next generation of innovators.” It’s an amazing program that helps students who are missed by a lot of programs giving them the help they need to complete their educations. They are particularly focused on women but have some money for men in community  colleges. Check them out if you know someone who needs a little help making it through.

It seemed like there were multiple interesting sessions in every time slot. Where I had to choose I picked panel or supporter sessions over paper sessions. Mainly that was because with paper sessions I could at least read the paper. Not the same thing but it was that or miss out on a panel completely.

The elephant in the room may have been COVID and masks. COVID times was a topic of conversation but masks? Not that I heard. The conference organized stated that even though CDC guidelines had changed the attendees had signed up expecting everyone would be masked so they were going to stick with that. I think it was the right decision. While masks are not always comfortable and they make it a little harder to recognize people it added to comfort levels for many attendees. Including me.

Sessions were split between the Rhode Island Convention center and the Omni hotel. The two are connected and traveling between them was pretty easy. I have a bias to all being in the same building but honestly I have walked further between sessions in some convention centers so there is that. The rooms themselves were large, accommodating people sitting apart if that made them more comfortable. I suspect that is what required using both facilities when one might have divided large rooms under normal circumstances.

Hybrid sessions where some or all of the presenters were remote were interesting. It worked pretty well overall. I hear there were some that were played recordings with no interaction but I didn’t “attend” any of them. The real bonus of a paper session is being able to ask the author questions so that is important. Mike Zamansky has more on this on his post at SIGCSE 2022 - Conference format.

I left Providence with a lot to think about and some great memories of visiting with people face to face – even with masks. Now to renew my passport so I can attend next year in Toronto!

Learning My nth Programming Language

They say that the second programming language is the hardest to learn. That’s mostly because one learns how to program using their first language but each language has its own idiom.  I was lucky in that before I completed my BS degree I had learned enough of at least six programming language to write usable programs. So when at my first professional programming job they handed me a language reference manual and a functional specification and asked me to develop on a new (to me) operating system I got on fairly well.

I continued to learn new programming languages over the following years and have lost count of them all. But having a project, a good reference manual, and usually some good sample code I had a lot of fun learning.

This spring I had to reconnect with Java and learn the Processing system. To be honest I used the code students had written before I took over the class for some of how I learned Processing. Syntax is new but concepts change a lot slower and experience (in this case with XNA) was very helpful. Having a wide range of experience sure does help. And I used Bing a lot

These days I am attempting to learn Python. I have a number of Python books written for beginners. They look great for beginners but for me they just don’t work. There is to much about how to program in general and finding what I need becomes tedious. Programming language documentation has changed over the years. For the most part that’s probably good. For me, well, let’s just say I miss the old dead tree simple language reference manual.

Finding good sample programs for what I want to learn has been a struggle as well. Search engine AIs are not as good as we need them to be yet. What to do? Well, this is were community comes into play. I asked for samples on the Computer Science Educator group on Facebook. Some brief conversations and Lisa Hines, a CS teacher from Canada, shared two wonderful samples that look like they should give me a real start. The Internet sure has made for some great community building for computer science teachers.

Trip Report: Teaching as a Long Term Sub

Well, this is not actually a trip report but its something like it. I spend the last couple of months teaching at Phillips Exeter Academy as a long term substitute. It was an interesting experience for many reasons. Not the least of those was the pandemic precautions.  Everyone wore masks inside and out, there were clear dividers between all of the seats around the table (more about that table in a minute), and for most of the time faculty were tested for COVID twice a week. I was fully vaccinated before I started there and the school ran vaccination clinics for faculty and students during the term.

Phillips is different from most other schools. It is the literal definition of an exclusive New England boarding school for a start. With a very competitive admissions process one is not surprised that the students are smart and highly motivated. Many of the students I talked to were looking for more academic rigor than their local schools. Needless to say classroom management was never even close to an issue.

As I alluded to earlier, classes at PEA are taught around a table. It’s a big table but class size is limited to about 13. None of my classes were larger than 12 and two sections were 10 students. Yes, that’s wonderful for a teacher. Between the small class size and teaching around a table it is not easy for a student to get lost. Teaching around a table forces a more conversational method of teaching. Its very interactive. I really enjoyed the format.

Another part of the system there is something they call METIC. I forget what that stands for but basically what it is is a mid-term check in. Students in the class are given some time without the teacher present to discuss what was going well in the class, what is not going well, and what students and teacher can do to make the rest of the term go better. Now this can be hard on the ego for some teachers especially if students are hard on them. My students, and from what I hear  most students at PEA, are very respectful and honest. Following time without the teacher, the teacher returns and the items the students brought up (written on the white board) are discussed. For me as a new comer to the particular school environment this was extremely valuable. This is something I wish had happened earlier in my teaching career. I think it would have made me a better teacher.

Everything was not all smooth sailing of course. I took over the course in the fourth week of the term and my students had two other teachers in the first three weeks. Figuring out what students knew and didn’t know took me a while. I also had to figure out a plan for the rest of the term. Fortunately, other members of the CS department were incredibly helpful and supportive. I was give full access to curriculum from a previous time these two courses had been taught. This saved immeasurable amounts of prep time.They were also always available for my many questions about the courses and the school’s processes.

As I alluded to in my earlier post (Back in the Classroom Again) I had to reacquaint myself with Java and learn my way around two IDEs (Eclipse and Processing) that I had never used before. Its tough answering questions about IDEs when you have no real experience with them. Fortunately I am good at exploring menus and looking up things on the Internet. I’m far from expert at either IDE but I’m not totally lost either. I found Processing and its graphics library fun and interesting. My old experience with XNA from years ago helped me out there. Though I do wish Processing had some built in collision detection. Probably good for students to figure out and code that for themselves but I’ve been spoiled by .NET. I would use Processing again for Java.

Overall, I had a great experience. I learned a lot, got to work with great teachers, and teach some awesome students. I’m not unhappy about getting back into retirement though.

Looking Back on Computer Science Education in 2020

What a year it has been. I was reading my start of the year post from January. The closing was “2019 has some serious potential.” I had no idea what was to come in 2020. By the middle of March I was teaching online to students who were doing their best to learn from home. It really changes a lot for teachers and students.

So what changed? Well, there was some serious growth in online development tools. Teachers moved to or increased their usage of tools like GitHub, Repl.it, and other online IDEs.  I still like the solution my school used (and continues to use now that they are mostly in-person) of a cloud based virtual machine. That the big cloud companies (I’m looking at you Microsoft and AWS)  haven’t jumped on this means they have missed a huge opportunity in my opinion.

Plans for a lot of physical computing went by the wayside as schools either didn’t have equipment to send home with students or didn’t want students sharing devices that could not be easily sterilized. I suspect emulators got a lot of use.

Along with school, conferences went virtual in 2020. It looks like that will continue into 2021 as SIGCSE will be virtual. It’s still uncertain if CSTA 2021 will be virtual or in-person.  CSTA 2020 went pretty well online. I enjoyed presenting virtually. Though to be honest it wasn’t quite as much fun as presenting in-person. I couldn’t hear people laugh at my jokes for one thing.

For myself, the biggest change of the year was retiring from the classroom at the end of June.  So I have missed most of the crazy on the fall of 2020 school year. I have been watching what my friends have been going through though. I guess I picked a good time to retire. I do miss the kids though.

Artificial Intelligence, Humor, and Appreciation of Beauty

Last night I started re-reading Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.  It’s an old book, written in the mid 1960s, so there are some old ideas about computers and computing in it for sure. There is some hand waving about how AI is done and how the computer, Mike or Mycroft Holmes, becomes self aware. It is fiction after all. The computer is trying to understand humor and a human friend is trying to help. One way he is helping is to get lists of jokes and report back on which jokes are funny, which are funny once, and which ones are always funny. That sounds a bit like machine learning we see today I think.

In any case, even is the computer does understand humor at some level and is able to create jokes that people find funny does that mean it has a real sense of humor? Will it be able to laugh at jokes that are not in its system? I wonder.

This makes me wonder about other things. We know that AI has been able to write music that people enjoy and create art that looks like it was done by master artists. Is creating art or music the same as enjoying art and music? Maybe not. Now human artists “hear” music in their heads before they write it down or play it. Beethoven write music while he was deaf and so could not hear it being played.

I’ve been to a number of wine tastings. I don’t like wine. No matter how many times I taste it I just don’t enjoy the taste. Listening to wine experts talk about wine and tasting it myself I think (could be wrong) I could learn to identify the wines that wine lovers like. I don’t see me enjoying the process very much though. Understanding is not the same as enjoying. Is it the same for computers and AI? I think so.Recognizing beauty or humor or music is not the same as enjoying it.

The difference between humans and AI is that humans enjoy their creations. And they enjoy the creations of others. If we think about creating beauty as enough to  being human-like  I think we have a narrow view of humans. What do you think?

What I miss and don’t miss about teaching

Fall has come and while students are back in school I am not. I’ve been reflecting a bit about that. I don’t miss getting up at 6 AM and driving for close to an hour to get to school. I don’t miss running my life by a bell schedule. I don’t miss grading, report cards, and other administrivia. I don’t miss classroom management issues.

On the other hand, I do miss interacting with students. I especially miss the interactions that take place outside of class. I miss the look, and sound, of students when they get a concept or when their program works – finally. I miss debugging student problems with programs or their project. Students are very good at finding ways to mess up a Visual Studio project. That’s the one big downside to using a professional tool. But I had fun putting things back together.

There are all sort of debugging issues that come up in the code. There is syntax issues (semi colon hide and seek anyone?) and logic problems. Both are fun little puzzles to solve. And I am sure there are still many that students have not discovered.

But the big miss is the students. I still think I retired at the right time for me.

I hope your school year is going well. I am following all sort of teacher/school things on social media and I know its not easy. Stay safe. And if you have a student program you can’t debug let me know.

Learning Python: Part 1

Python has been on my radar for years but I haven’t really had the motivation to learn it myself. It’s time though for several reasons. Reason number one is that I need a learning goal to keep stretching my mind and knowledge. I don’t have a bunch of students finding new puzzles to solve so I have to make my own mistakes.

First step was to pick a development tool. I have played with a bunch. IDLE, PyCharm, Processing, and some I forget. I didn’t like any of them. So I am using Visual Studio. I expect many to tell me that was/is a horrible choice but its the devil I know so there is that. Many of the tools feel like steps backwards to me. I’ve gotten spoiled by the Intellisence in Visual Studio among other features. IDLE felt like what I used to learn BASIC-Plus 40+ years ago. Anyway, I want to spend my time learning a language not an IDE.

OF course there are two parts to learning a new programming language. Part one is the basic syntax. Part two is the idiom of the language. The first part is easy. The second not so much.

I’ve started with easy stuff. Declaration of variables, simple math, declaration of functions, and control flow. IF statements and while loops were pretty straight forward. For loops are different and idiom rears its ugly head here first for me.

For loops in Python seem to be what I think of a ForEach loops in other languages. Very powerful and useful. On the other hand, how do I do the equivalent of:

for (i=0; i <= 100; i+=5)
or
for i =0 to 100 step 5

Or do I need to use a While loop to do this? Go ahead, show off in the comments and help me out.

String manipulation, one of my favorite things to code, is probably next for me.I think that will be ok.  Lists and dictionary come after that. I think I will have to read up on them as they look to be thought of differently than arrays in the languages I am used to using. They also look like fun and powerful to use. So there is that.

Classes after that. Hopefully that moves quickly.

Once I get some basics down I’ll start looking into various libraries and what not. Perhaps go back to try some graphics in Processing. Is there an equivalent to Windows Forms like I use with C# and Visual Basic? Or do I have to go backwards again to do that?

At least I’m having fun. Now to go crack a book.

Setting Up To Teach From Home

This past spring semester was my first time teaching remotely but not my first time working remotely. I worked from home while working in industry for jsut over 9 years. The latter probably helped me set up to teach remotely. Still, I learned a few things about being a remote teacher. I thought I should write it up and see what other ideas people might have to share.

First, you need to work somewhere outside the main events of the household. An office is ideal of course but not many of us have that option.  Still you want to find a place that is not busy when others are home, where they are a minimum of distractions, and where you don’t have to set up and break down your work equipment every day.

If you are presenting with video you want to be aware of your background. To much light behind or from the side can be a problem for the video. You want to know what is behind you. Will it distract others? Will it show things that are to personal to share with the whole world? I know teachers who have hung sheets behind them. That is probably not necessary but you want to be deliberate about what other see in the video.

Speaking of video, you want a good camera. I’ve seen some debate over webcam or built-in camera and I don’t have a firm opinion. If you have a good camera in your laptop or desktop you will probably be fine. In either case, make sure you are centered in the image it takes.

I find that a headset works better than the microphone and speaker built into at computer. A headset keeps out extraneous noise from both your ears and the conversation. It helps avoid distracting noises in the house as well. I know that a few teachers I know have purchased “gamer headsets” and found they work very well. They’re not that expensive either.

Speaking of gamer equipment, a comfortable chair is a must as you will be in it longer than you would be if teaching in person. Several teachers I know have been buying chairs made for computer gamers. What ever chair you get should be comfortable and sturdy.

Screens? You really want, I almost say need, two or more windows. Professional developers argue over which is better – two (or three) monitors or one very large monitor with multiple windows. I suspect that for most teachers a second monitor is less expensive than a very large monitor. Cost aside, personal preference rules in the hardware decision. I used two laptops side by side this spring but I would use one with a second screen if I were doing it again. I might have a second laptop as well since I have several anyway but that would be more of a backup than a principle workstation. Being able to copy things from one window to another is invaluable.

I used to keep one window showing that online meeting with student faces and the second with what ever I was demonstrating or presenting. I also liked to have my student information system, for attendance, in one window and the Zoom or Meet window in another to make taking attendance easier. That was much easier than switching windows on one screen. I did the same thing when grading. Work I was grading in one window and gradebook software in the other window. Since work was all being submitted online this was the easiest way to work for me. Your mileage may vary of course.

I can’t forget the network. Wi-fi works when it works. Wired connections are almost always faster and more reliable (I sometimes lose WIFI when the microwave runs),  It’s not always easy to set up but if you can use a wired connection I do recommend that you do..

Will teachers be teaching remotely in the fall? I don’t know that anyone knows for sure. It doesn’t hurt to prepare for multiple eventualities though.

Am I Retired Now?

My last class of the school year just ended. My grades and report card comments are in the system. I am not going back to school in the fall. Am I retired now? I guess so. It feels weird as if there is no real closure. It doesn’t feel real. I actually updated a PowerPoint today that I have no immediate plans to use. Just seemed like the right thing to do.

People are asking me what’s next and to be honest that is unclear. I will be presenting at CSTA 2020 this summer. That will be online which is also weird. I will really miss the the hallway thread. I am on the conference committee for CSTA 2021 so CSTA and I are clearly not done with each other.  I hope to actually make more CSTA New Hampshire meetings. If I can swing it I hope to make some other conferences as well. There is one in Canada I have always wanted to attend and SIGCSE may be doable as well. I will not have to miss school for it at least.

Anyone want to pay my way somewhere, anywhere once the world is open again and have me  speak?

A lot of people have suggested teaching online and I  am considering it. I have mixed feelings about it and it would have to be the right situation.

Once the lockdown is over I plan to spend more time with my grandson. I am really looking forward to that.

I have a book idea or two that I want to work on. So that may keep me busy a bit.

As for this blog, I intend to keep going with it. I keep running into ideas to share and doing so seems like a good thing to do.

Teaching is About Relationships

Today I was online with my students for about 90 minutes of a planned 55 minute class. One of my students joined the Google Meet session early and we chatted for a while. We talked mostly about how things were different learning online. I also had students stay after the scheduled end of class for extra help and we also talked about online learning for a while.

For me, as for I suspect most teachers, the best part of the job is building relationships with students. That is harder when teaching online. There are few chats between classes, before and after school, or during lunch room supervision. Many teachers I have heard from talk about how they are glad they got to establish relationships with the students they teach before we went to emergency remote teaching.

One of my students this morning said that she was worried about incoming freshmen if school starts online. They will not have the relationships that help adjust to a new school. They will also not have the technology experience that current students had even before we moved online.

Students tell me these out of class chats are important to them. From my observations, students who establish a good relationship with even one teacher are happier and more successful in school. I wonder how we can develop those relationships if school stays online.

My students tell me that they would rather be in the physical building. They miss their friends but they also recognize that they learn better in a physical classroom than online. Sure it is nice to be able to eat in class, have a restroom close at hand, and be able to do things at home without the travel to and from school but that’s not enough.

One student told me today that she misses the atmosphere of school. There is a feeling in the building that helps her feel comfortable and ready to learn. That is the sort of intangible that often gets overlooked during discussions of moving education online. Yes, it is less expensive. No doubt about it. But we lose so much. Students know this. They may not all have known this before but they are seeing things through a different lens today. So are teachers. I hope parents see it as well.

I’ve had almost prefect attendance in my online classes. The reasons for that are many, varied, and complicated but I believe that relationships have had a huge influence. Relationships between students and teachers and relationships with the culture of the school have all played a part. Plus I have really amazing people for students. I’m a lucky guy.

What is your School IT Department’s Mission?

My school ran a pair of online awards events yesterday. We had almost 850 people on the day time Zoom meeting and around 500 on the evening one. These are both on a par with our events in the building in previous years. But that is not what I really want o focus on. I want to focus on how this is possible

As part of the day, the highest award the school presents to a member of the faculty or staff was awarded to our director of technology. It is largely because of his leadership that we were able as a school to move online as quickly and as effectively as we did.

Largely because of his work, our students were used to going online for assignments, to taking quizzes and tests online, and to turning in assignments online. Teachers are used to taking attendance online, giving assignments online, and many other things essential for the running of the classroom. In preparation for moving online faculty were given their first training and preparation weeks before we actually had to move to teaching from home. We got more training once the decision was made.

This happened because our IT department, from the top down and with the support of the school’s administration, has the same mission as the school. The IT people see their role as helping everyone use technology to teach and learn. Our It director has taught several classes the last two years and learned first hand how technology can be used and has used that experience to help prepare teachers to use it.

My school is fortunate to have an experienced and dedicated Director of IT who fully embraces the mission of the school. I suspect that him being a graduate of the school as are his three children doesn’t hurt.

Over the years I have visited many schools were IT departments and teachers, especially computer science teachers, have had an almost adversarial relationship. Teachers may want to teach things that the IT department is afraid of students learning. Or IT departments have made decisions about policy, hardware, and software without considering the needs of teachers.

Among the many lessons we are learning during these unusual time is that teachers and IT have to be partners working together for a common goal and with a common mission.