Looking Back on Blogging

Both Doug Peterson (https://dougpete.wordpress.com/2019/12/30/10-years-ago-2/) and Mike Zamansky (https://cestlaz.github.io/post/10-years-blogging/) posted to their blogs about blogs from ten years ago. It was pretty interesting. Mike did some analysis of his blogging rates over the months and years. I took a look at my blog posts from ten years ago. I was posting on two sites back then. One a Microsoft owned platform which was my main blogging site at the time. I was cross posting some things to this site as well. Ten years ago this time of year I was posting about projects involving random variables, talking about Monte Carlo simulations, and roulette and slot machines.

Rather than look at ten years ago or do some sort of data analysis of the last ten years (complicated by two blogging sites) I thought I would look at this time as far back as I could. So 14 years ago at the MSDN site I posted a rather aspirational look at The Future of K-12 Blogging I wasn’t even close in terms of prediction.

I think more teachers and administrators are blogging. We’re not seeing anything like the expansion of computer science teacher blogs I was hoping for. I like to think I made a good case for it and that it is still a good case.

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Every computer science teacher should have a regularly updated blog. Actually I would like to see every teacher have a blog but for the short term I will settle for computer science teachers blogging. There are several reasons for this.

1. We need to build a community of practice in CS education. We need computer science teachers, who are generally alone in their building, communicating with their peers, sharing ideas, and supporting each other.
2. The technology aware teachers need to set an example for the rest of the teachers. If they don’t use technology why should a social studies teacher?
3. Most importantly, blogging is a wonderful way to share information with your students and their parents. Post links to extra resources along with a recap of a recent lecture. Give students an opportunity to comment on a current assignment or a recent test question. Expand the discussion and the learning outside the bell delimitated world of the classroom. Teach!

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I'm really grateful to the CS educators who are blogging though. Mike Zamansky, Garth Flint, Doug Bergman, and Mark Guzdial have been particularly helpful to me learning and thinking. There are others listed at my Computer Science Education blog roll.

Looking Back on Computer Science Education 2019

Christmas break for me until 6 January 2020 and with Christmas over I have some time to think. 2019 was an intere3sting year in CS education. States continue to adopt more CS in K12. Teachers are still in short supply but so to are schools looking to hire them. Schools or perhaps school administrations and school boards, are slow to roll out more CS education. It looks like more schools are offering it which is great. But they are net requiring it so while they meet to checklist of offering CS it is still not for everyone. It’s going to take a while.

AP CS Principles continues to grow in enrollment. I try to get excited about that but it’s hard. AP courses attract too small a subset of the over all population. While there is much to like about AP CS Principles I can’t help but believe we need some more interesting CS courses. Something with depth and an interesting and motivating outcome. The Create task is not that.

Every year I think that the Internet of Things will take off in CS education. The mix of bytes and atoms seems like a natural to me. That didn’t happen in 2019. Perhaps because there is no one promoting it.  I plan on retiring from the classroom in the spring. Maybe after that I will have to time to really dig into it. Who knows, maybe I’ll come up with some good project ideas.

Cloud computing grew a bit in interest in 2019. Amazon Web Services has done some great work on this. Uptake has been slow but at some point it may take off. The problem with cloud computing, and perhaps IoT, is fitting it into the curriculum. It doesn’t fit easily in either AP CS course and too many teachers are working and teaching too many preps to adopt major new topics.

Artificial Intelligence took a jump in interest that surprised me a bit. There was a huge birds of a feature on the topic at last summer’s CSTA conference. AI for K12 has its own website, mailing list, and lots of people interested. See AI4K12.org for more on that.

What sort of Artificial Intelligence can you teach in K-12? Mostly how it is used, how to use existing AI tool and machine learning training systems. Developing real AI takes a lot of math that not many K-12 students have yet. Still, it is very important that students learn this much. The need to know what AI/ML is, how it is used, and discuss the ethnical considerations involved.

As always,the new year is full of potential. K12 CS is on a growing path that seems to have some momentum behind it.  I can’t wait to see what it brings.

Explain This Confusing Code

My major task today has been finishing off the semester exam for my Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles students. They’re not happy about having an exam but that’s life. Writing a good exam is difficult. Fortunately I have some previous exams to work with. Some I wrote, some other AP CS P teachers wrote. I’m getting close to done. I want to have AP exam style questions to help my students prepare for the actual AP exam in the spring but of course the main purpose is to put a grade in the grade book. OK I’m half kidding. I seriously want to get a handle on what information they have learned and what I should review before we move on.

Coincidently someone posted a question for the AP CS A question bank on Facebook asking for help with explaining it.

How does this evaluate for Java: x / 10 % 2 ?

This is exactly the sort of question that had one of my APCS A students some years ago say there were a lot of examples of poor coding practice in the AP Exam. And this, in my opinion, is a terrible coding practice. I can understand why the question may be attractive to some. The whole order of operations thing. Students should understand it. But good coding practice is to avoid ambiguity and this code is loaded with ambiguity.

Is this integer division? 10 looks like an integer to me. Making it 10.0 would make it look like a floating point number of course. How do you make “x” look like a specific data type? This is not FORTRAN IV where it would be a double since it doesn’t start with a letter from “i” through “n.” And remembering the order of precedence between modulus and division? Who has room in their brain for that to be top of mind?

This makes a great discussion question. A great question to emphasis the need to use parentheses to remove ambiguity. There is no way it would pass code review in a professional development environment though. At least not a review I want to be part of.

Well, I should go finish writing my test and trying to avoid writing horrible questions.

Coding Without a Net

My Programming Honors students are struggling with creating classes in C#. They really wanted me to code up a project live (again) and have them follow along. But I’ve used my usual examples and samples and projects already. First message is that I need more but I had to come up with one for today. And I had writers block. About a half hour before class, with a bit of panic setting in, the other computer teacher suggested a reindeer class. For Santa’s sled. For data use a name, their position on the sled, and if they have a red or black nose. Ok a bit of a goof perhaps but simple and seasonal. Why not?

Now I don’t know about you, but I prefer to write demo code several times before writing it again live in front of an audience. Not an option today but how hard can it be? I’ve written classes many times before and my content knowledge is solid.

I honestly hoped I would make some mistakes. Hopefully the students would catch them. Great learning experience. And yes, I did make a couple of mistakes. I forgot to make the class data private right off the bat. I called for a string parameter in the constructor that should have been an integer. A student caught that one. Winning!

The hardest part for me is that I had only thought through writing the class but now how to test it. I had thought about the constructor (and prepared a data file with 8 normal reindeer and Rudolph) and using ToString (overridden of course) for testing purposes. I had to make up a test for various other properties on the fly. At least that meant students got to see/hear my design thoughts as they happened.

  I’ve also been thinking about a Santa’s sled class that would have an array of reindeer objects. That might be fun if I figure it all out.

Things went pretty well actually. I got a lot of ideas which doing the demo and I’ll be more prepared in the next semester. I need to come up with something seasonal for the spring though. A prom dress class perhaps?So many ideas.

Coding for Fun and Advent of Code

My friend Mike Zamansky is a big proponent of the Advent of Code – 25 days of coding problems leading up the Christmas. Since I have been thinking I want to write more code for my personal enjoyment I started in on it myself. Day 1 and Day 2 were interesting (to me) problems and I enjoyed doing them. Day 3 didn’t appeal to me. It looked like something I would want to be paid to write so I didn’t do it. Day 4 looks interesting so I plan on taking it one some time today. After all, it is not coding for fun if it isn’t fun. I’m not looking to prove anything to myself or anyone else at this point in my life. Mike has been blogging about the problems he has been doing from a teacher’s perspective. I highly recommend his commentary https://cestlaz.github.io/

The Day 2 problem was particularly interesting to me though. It is a very simplified computer simulator. Only 3 instructions – 1 for add, 2 for multiply, and 99 for halt. with each of the first two operators having three parameters – location of the two numbers to operate on and the location to save the result. It is potentially self modifying code if any of the addresses points to an operator later in the list of instructions.

The obvious enhancement is to add more operators – division and subtraction for sure. Having a set number of parameters makes things easy so having variable numbers of parameters adds some complication. The more I thought about expansion the more I found myself contemplating a more complete “assembly language” especially as I found myself thinking about literal data and pointers as different types of parameters. Maybe I spent too much of my career writing in various assembly languages. In any case, as a thought exercise I found myself going far beyond what I would want to assign to a beginning programmer.

So I am pulling back a bit. I’m thinking about several smaller pieces. The easy part of a simulator with a few more operators. But maybe, also, what would a compiler look like that would create input for such a simulator? How would it load data into appropriate places? That’s a more advanced project but maybe something for me  to write to make it easier to create input for the simulator?

If nothing else, looking at Advent of Code is giving me ideas for both students and myself. Now that is fun.

What’s In A Name?

Naming things seems to be a continual problem with programming students. I’ve written about this before (two years ago A Rose By Any Other Name Gives An Error ). I can’t seem to get a handle on it with students. I think part of the problem is that students are good with ambiguity and inference. If you call a student by the wrong name or a diminutive they don't’ use themselves you may get a correction (think warning in computer speak) but they know who you are talking to/about. Compilers are a lot more fussy.

Case-sensitive languages differentiate between “question” and “question.”  Forget about adding extra letters or misspelling a name.

Somehow students have trouble looking that closely at words. I’m not sure if that is because they are too used to filling in the blanks of misspelled words or something else? I do notice that I see a lot of typos and spelling errors in other written work they do. Even though there are spell checking tools built into editors.

Part of the problem may be error messages. Well, that students don’t always read the error messages is part one. But even when they do the messages are not always helpful enough. “Variable does not exist in current context” is pretty meaningful for an experienced programmer. We understand things like scope for one thing. We also know to look for spelling differences. Students sometimes have trouble parsing that all out though. It is something that comes with experience.

Unclear error messages have long been a problem. I think that maybe it is because the people who write the messages have too much knowledge and so assume too much knowledge on the part of programmers. Then again most development tools are designed for experienced programmers and not beginners.

I wonder if smart IDEs will one day help beginners. Perhaps artificial intelligence modules will look at code and ask “Did you mean ‘Question’ and not "’question?” or “did you forget to declare this variable?” Or even “this variable is outside the scope of where it was declared.” This is the sort of hint that teachers give now.

All in all I think the answer is to make the tools more relatable to the people who use them. Teaching computers, which can be very difficult, seems, some days, to be a lot easier than teaching high school students.

Coding For Fun

As with so many things, it started with Doug Peterson. Doug recently posted about something called 100 days of code. This got me started about the need I feel (some times) to do more coding for fun. Or at least coding projects for my own interest and not for “work” purposes. Next up was Mike Zamansky (yet another good idea fairy whose blog I follow) Mike posted about some text based projects he was introducing to teachers during some professional development he has been running. Links below.

Now I love messing around with textual data. Love it. And I’d been thinking about that already and posted about one project recently. Mike’s most recent post reminded me of something I did “back in the day” when we used markup languages to feed into word processing systems (i.e. before WYSIWYG editors) I created my own concordance of the Bible. It was pretty cool to be able to do something like that. I may have to look for tools to do something similar. Maybe with HTML? We’ll see.

I also have a number of “things” that can be programmed sitting around at home.

The trouble is time. Well, honestly, not so much time as prioritization. There are other things to do. School stuff for example. Grading, lesson planning, and all that. And home stuff like the tables I want to build and the hydroponics system I have the materials for but haven’t built yet. And books to read. I need to be exercising more. And, well, you get the picture.

I suppose I could be coding and not writing this blog post as well. Sigh. I wonder if I wrote a scheduling app to help me out?

How about you? Do you code for fun or for learning (which is fun too) or is coding not part of your definition of fun? IF you do like to code how do you prioritize it? Does 100 days of code appeal to you?

Related Blog posts:

• Working with texts part 1 - cleaning the data – by Mike Zamansky
• Working with texts part 2 - bag of words - by Mike Zamansky
• I Speak Jive – by Mike Zamansky
• How Many Words in That Text?  - by Alfred Thompson
• Palindrome Project – by Alfred Thompson

Teachers Helping Teachers For Free

I understand the appeal of sites like Teachers Pay Teachers. Really I do. Some teachers are awesome at creating resources and the idea of getting paid to share them is attractive to underpaid and over worked teachers. Even Amazon, never one to miss a chance to make money, is getting in the business of supporting this idea (Amazon Starts Marketplace for Teachers to Sell Online Educational Resources) . For some reason the idea of asking poor under paid and under resourced teachers to pay for stuff that I have developed for my own use just doesn’t feel right.

I have no problem with teachers who decide to ask other teachers to pay for resources. I have no problem with people who make creating and selling resources in order to make a living. It’s a free country. I hope they have no problem with me giving stuff away for free.

I made a comment to this effect on Twitter and Mike Zamansky replied with “When I was starting out I only survived by the good graces of more senior teachers who mentored and just as importantly SHARED materials (free of charge). This shows the disconnect between capitalists and educators.”

I think that has been the experience for many of us. We survived and continue to survive because others share resources with us.

I’ve been pretty lucky myself. The first real resource I shared online was a pair of project books for Visual Basic and Visual C#. I got paid to write the first editions. By Microsoft not by other teachers. Teachers got them for free. I subsequently updated and expanded them several times as the software was updated but while the books were still free I no longer got paid to write them. I was and am ok with that. I got plenty of use from those projects myself. The feeling of helping other teachers is a reward in itself.

In full disclosure, I have a couple of self-published books on Amazon now. Mostly because creating hard copy books to give away is more than I can spend. But I haven’t turned down teachers who request PDF versions.

I have also benefited from resources shared by others. PowerPoint presentations, video demonstrations, project ideas, and a host of other resources that people have shared over the years have greatly benefited my teaching and learning.  I am very grateful for those who have generously shared those resources.

One day maybe teachers will not be under resourced and under paid. For now though far too many are. That’s why I think we should do as much as we can to support each other.

Not Too Easy and Not Too Hard

We’re covering Classes and Objects in my Programming Honors course this week. Specifically we are learning how to program classes in C# and use them in programs.  The struggle for me is to come up with classes that are interesting to students, practical for them to use, and not overly complicated. This is not Advanced Placement computer science A and we don’t have a whole year for the course.

I start with a simple Dice class. Easy enough as an introduction . I also live coded a Coin class. The difference being that I added images to the coin class to show them that more interesting objects can be used in classes. So what next?

Things I have used in the past include a playing card class. Interestingly enough this has had cultural implications. I have international students who are not always as familiar with American playing cards. But it works. There are a lot of pieces to playing cards and you can do them simply (face value and suit) or complicated (Face value, suit, nominal value – face cards are 10, front and back images, suit color, text names, etc) Methods and constructors can get interesting to say the least. So can creating programs to use the “cards.”

I tried a Pez dispenser class once. I do have a 12 inch Pez dispenser on my desk after all. I’ve done it the simple way with just a capacity value and a current count value. What I would really like to do is use a stack in the Pez dispenser class and have candy objects to put in it. If I were teaching APCS A and had time to cover stacks I would do this for sure. But I don’t.

I’ve thought about revisiting some of the class projects from prior AP courses. Anyone remember BigInt? I kind of liked that one. I did more with the Marine Biology Case Student but my students never really liked it. They called it the DAF – Dumb Ass Fish case study. Both may be a bit much for the time I have though.

I had some fun with a quiz question class last year. Data included the question, an array of possible answers, and an index of the correct answer. I liked that for showing how flexible array parameters could be. A true/false question is just a question with two possible answers. The next design question is of course do you have a simple array of questions or do you design a quiz class? If a quiz class, what does that even look like? Might be fun the have students try that design.

I’m still playing with more ideas. I’ll have to use something tomorrow but maybe the good idea fairy will hit before Monday. Suggestions anyone?

Define Better

Someone posted an interesting question on Facebook.

Is using ++i(pre-increment) better than i++(post-increment) ?

My reply was to ask for a definition of “better.” The Facebook posts have a lot of answers from people who appear to not have written a compiler themselves and who making a lot of assumptions. But the point of this post is not to discuss which option is better for some nebulous definition of “better.” Rather is is to think about asking the question of what do we mean by “better?”

There are a lot of what I call religious arguments in computing. Tabs or spaces, curly braces in columns or have the open on the end of a line, what is the best programming language, and on and on. Most of them stem from differing definitions of “better.”

Sometimes things matter very much at one point in time but not at all later and yet the bias from early days remains. There was a time with memory was so tight that a single character variable name was much preferred to a longer more descriptive name because of the space used. Most of my readers probably don’t remember those days but I do. Fortunately I recognized when the change happened. Not everyone did so quickly.  This is possibly at the heart of some of the tabs vs spaces argument for at least some old timers.

Other issues have become moot or mostly moot because we have so much smarter compilers and interpreters these days. We have long been at the point where compilers write better low level code from high level code than even the best assembly language coders. I seriously doubt that there is a difference between the code generated for ++i or i++ as the incrementor in a for loop these days. Compilers are too smart for that. Compiler writers think long and hard about those sorts of things.

How doubly dimensioned arrays are declared used to make a bigger difference than it does today. I can remember thinking long and hard about how to declare and iterate through two dimensioned arrays. You pretty much had to know how the compiler would allocate memory and what cache would look like to get optimal performance. I don’t think many people think about that today except for the most performance critical applications. Applications we don’t give to beginners anyway. Compilers do a lot of optimization on this sort of process so we don’t have to think much about it. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning (see also AI-assisted Programming) are probably going to make compilers even better than they are today.

Today I think “better” in terms of programming should mean “easier for programmers.” Easier to write, easier to understand, easier to modify, and to allow programmers to think about the end result and not the assembly/machine language generated.  Let the software do what software is good at and people do what people are good at.

AI-assisted Programming

As I said in yesterday’s blog post,Microsoft has been running their big MSIgnite event this week and making all sorts of announcements. One interesting announcement what improvements to what they call Visual Studio IntelliCode.  The idea is that they are using machine learning to help programmers with writing code. In the latest update are whole line completions and refactoring. Interesting.

I haven’t seen IntelliCode in use before and it is probably because it is not turned on by default. I did some searching and found that it can be turned on as an Extension (I had to search a bit under the Manage Extentions option) and then you can customize aspects of it from Tools –> Options –> IntelliCode. Oh, and you need Visual Studio or VS Code 2019 for this. I am using Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition which is free.

SO far I am not seeing obvious help from it but it may be that I have to do something more complicated in my code or write more code first. It does apparently take context into account for its suggestions and I may not have given it enough yet. But I’ll keep playing. And maybe I should look for some video demos online.

There are other things to think about though regardless of if it has been useful already. What is the training like? The write up I have seen says that it learns from examples on GitHub. Initially that scared me as literally anyone can upload to GitHub. One reference I found said  something about the 500 best repositories on GitHub. What ever that means. And what was the criteria for “500 best?”  What sort of standards will this learning suggest?

Some of the documentation talks about options for using other databases of code to train the system so that businesses can train the AI with their code and standards. As a teacher I wonder if there could be a training set for AP Computer Science A? I think Java is supported with IntelliCode in Visual Studio Code.

No doubt some will complain that it is “too much help” for beginners but I’m not sure about that. You still have to know enough to take or reject suggestions for one thing. And having the computer tell a beginner something like “you should make a method to reduce this redundant code” might be better received than the same comment from a human teacher.

Will this help students learn more or dumb down the process? I’m an optimist and think it will be a good thing. What are your thoughts and concerns?

Visual Studio Online–Possibilities for Education?

Microsoft has been running their big MSIgnite event this week and making all sorts of announcements.  One of them was a cloud-based development environment called Visual Studio Online.

OK, that looks interesting and I will probably try it out soon. It may be an answer for people pushed to Chromebooks,  others who are at one to one bring your own device schools, or just want students to wrote programs from home. I wonder how it works on otherwise underpowered older computers?  There is some concern about costs and that is something I need to understand.

Maybe I can find someone with an education focus at Microsoft to explain how it might work cost effectively for schools and students.  Or maybe I can figure it out through all the marketing hype. We’ll see but it sure does look worth looking into in more detail.

Question added later: I wonder if this will let me develop iPhone apps without buying a Mac? Anyone know?

CSTA at 15 #CSTAat15

The Computer Science Teachers Association is now 15 years old. I’ve been a member from the start and I have to say that in some ways it feels like it has always been there but in other ways it feels like it just started.  There was a K-12 computer science education community before CSTA. But it was small and one could easily feel alone. CSTA brought a new sense of community and togetherness. Most of all, perhaps, it brought us organization and a stronger sense of belonging.

There was the CS & IT Conference (now called the CSTA Annual Conference)  before CSTA as well but it didn’t have the same feeling of permanence and sustainability that CSTA brought to it. CSTA brought growth and strength to the conference. It’s been the annual highlight of my professional development for years now. Presenting at several of these conferences has been a huge privilege and honor. And added to my learning as well.

After I left industry some years ago I ran for and won a seat on the CSTA Board. What a wonderful experience those four years were. Hectic as we changed Executive Directors during that time. It was a real time of transition. That wasn’t as smooth as many of us would have liked and I think we experienced some growing pains during those years. We’re on our third ED now but things seem to be well on track. Kudos to the Board (after me) who lead the way through the last couple of years and another ED transition. We have an amazing board at CSTA who work very hard for the membership.

The growth of chapters has been a big part of the CSTA story.  Fairly early on, CSTA developed programs to train and prepare chapter leaders and that has paid off in spades. There are more and stronger chapters than ever before. CSTA is both national AND local and that is important.

CSTA has helped train advocates among teachers and support them locally. CSTA members have advocated, lobbied, pushed, and otherwise promoted CS in their states, counties, school districts, and yes even nationally. Some of the companies and other groups get a lot of credit for the growth in computer science education in the US but the real heroes are individual teachers who alone or with other CSTA members did the ground work to make things happen.

From conferences to board membership to involvement with committees and connections with life long friends CSTA has been an important part of my life. I can’t wait to see what the next fifteen years bring.

Magic 8 Ball and Projects From Real Life

There has been a 12 inch tall Pez dispenser on my desk for a couple of years now. It’s a great visual aid for talking about stacks. Today I got a Magic 8 Ball as well. It turns out that a lot of my students were unfamiliar with this staple toy of my youth. Since I really like using the Magic 8 ball program as a demonstration I decided I really had to get a physical ball.

At this point in the semester we have covered loops and arrays and it is time to make programs more interesting by adding more data. I want to use something that makes sense and is not just a demo without meaning or purpose. Having code you can have some fun with is always a plus as well.

I went to Wikipedia and found the classic 8 ball answers and placed them in a text file. My demo reads the file into an array when the program loads. Once the array is built clicking a button displays a random answer. It’s pretty simple to code and we code it together as a class. Students love asking it questions when we’re done.

Usually I have students add their own answers to the text file and then modify the program to handle the new set of answers. We also talk about different ways this could be coded. What if we didn’t know how many answers/lines were in the file? Would be use a different loop and/or a different array type like an arrrylist? What options (methods or functions) should we use to provide the most flexibility?

This also provides students with some sample code to look at when I assign larger projects and expect them to do much more on their own. Is this a good project? Magic 8 ball says “Yes definitely.”

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.