Twitter Recommendations for CS Educators

Some time ago I wrote a post on top CS education people to follow on Twitter. It was very objective as I took the people on my CS Educator Twitter list and ranked them all by Klout score. It was an unsatisfying experience because the people I follow the most, enjoy the most, and learn from the most were not all there. And some of the top people on the list I don’t actually get a lot from. As I was tweeting Follow Friday recommendations today I decided to write a blog post with recommendations that are more personal.

BTW many of these people also show up on my Computer Science Education Blog Roll.

CS Teachers

I will be adding to this over time as I review my retweets and think more about it but these people I follow a lot. When they tweet it is worth reading.

• @lblanken  Laura Blankenship is the Computer Science Coordinator at The Baldwin School – a private girls school. She teaches a wide range of grades. My interview with Laura is at Laura Blankenship)
• @dougbergmanUSA  Doug Bergman is a Computer Science teacher in Charleston, South Carolina. An award winning educator he does a lot of creative and innovative things with his students. (My interview with Doug is at Doug Bergman)
• @lzulli Lou Zulli teaches computer science at a public school in Florida. His students create applications that are used daily in their school. (My interview with Lou is at Louis Zulli Jr.)
• @reesegans Patrice Gans teaches at the Univ. of Chicago Lab Schools. She is also the K-8 CS education representative to the CSTA Board of Directors.
• @gailcarmichael Gail Carmichael is a PhD-student-on-leave researching nonlinear storytelling in games at Carleton University. Currently teaching she has a lot of insights into teaching CS.
• ‏@superCompSci Rebecca Dovi teaches at Patrick Henry High School which is north of Richmond VA. I retweet her links a lot! (I interview Rebecca at Rebecca Dovi)
• ‏@zamansky Mike Zamansky teaches at a top rated public high school in New York City. He’s doing a lot of things in CS education and outreach that go beyond the classroom and even beyond his school. (I interviewed Mike at Mike Zamansky)

Canadian Educators

The education twitterverse sometimes feels like an American echo chamber. These top people in Canada keep my perspective broader than the US.

• @dougpete If you only follow one educator in Canada Doug Peterson is who you should follow. If you live or teach in Ontario you must follow him. He’s just the most connected education person I have found. And a great guy who shares information broadly.
• @pbeens Peter Beens teaches CS at Beamsville District Secondary School in a small town in Ontario. Peter takes and shares some great pictures from education events BTW. (My interview with Peter is at Peter Beens )
• @PeterVogel Peter Vogel is an outstanding Physics and computer teacher in Western Canada. He’s one of the people I have been following longest on Twitter. I've learned a lot from the things he shares on Twitter on a range of education topics.

Others in CS Education

• @MrYongpradit Pat Yongpradit is the Director of Education at Code.org. A former high school CS teacher he shares a lot of good information about what is going on in the area of CS education and activism for expanding CS ed in schools. (My interview with Pat is at Pat Yongpradit )
• @caitsydney Cait Sydney Pickens is a computer science education researcher currently working on a project in North Carolina to spread more computer science education in that state. (My interview with Cait Sydney is at Cait Sydney Pickens)
• @lsudol Leigh Ann Sudol-DeLyser is a former high school CS teacher wrapping up a PhD in CS education. She is active with some pioneering schools in New York City as well as other CS outreach activities.

School Administrators

• @chrislehmann Chris Lehmann is the Founding Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia PA. A frequent speaker on education and education leadership you may have heard him at ISTE or seen his picture on the cover of ISTE magazine. An outstanding advocate for students he is just a great guy to know.
•  @NMHS_Principal Eric Sheninger is the Principal of New Milford HS (NJ) He’s a regular speaker about education technology.
• @ewilliams65 Eric Williams is a Superintendent in Virginia promoting teaching and learning that engages students. He directly sends me interesting links which I appreciate a lot.
• @principalspage Sometimes serious, sometimes funny – always interesting. Michael Smith is the superintendent of a small school district in Illinois.

Education Technology Reporters

• @audreywatters Audrey Watters is a freelance journalist who casts a critical but fair eye on education technology. As independent as they come.
• @kenroyal Ken Royal edits connectlearningtoday.com which is sponsored by Promethean. Well connected with educators and education companies I find a lot of good reads via his twitter feed. Oh and I occasionally write articles he publishes at Connected Learning Today.

Would a TV Show Fix the CS Recruitment Program?

A recent article in the New York Times called “I am Woman, Watch me Hack” brought up an idea I hear expressed pretty regularly. The idea is that the right TV show or movie with the right plot and actors could change the way computer science is viewed by young people in a good way.

It’s a tempting idea. There is some indication that shows like “CSI” and “Bones” have increased interest in forensic sciences. A single scene in a single movie is often credited (or blamed) for a shape decrease in the number of men who wear undershirts. Most often computer scientists and others in computer science jobs in movies and TV shows are portrayed in unflattering ways. Does this contribute to the negative perceptions many people have of CS? Seems possible.

The portrayal of computer people in the media has been a mixed bag. We’re seeing more women playing computer expert roles but even there they tend to be a bit too geeky. They are often socially awkward for example. They are seldom as “Hollywood hot” as the Police detectives or FBI agents or CSIs are. And the guys? I just finished watching an episode of a TV show were almost all of the people working at a software startup were geeky looking guys with glasses who didn’t seem to know how to relate to women. hardly the image we want people thinking of as typical. On the other hand some of us remember Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor. (And a PDP-8 in the opening sequence.)

While some of these images are not exactly helpful are they hurting the field? Quite possibly. Would positive images help improve our image? Perhaps. I don’t know that it would or if it would help how much it would help. On the other hand I wish people in computer science roles were portrayed in a more favorable way. If nothing else it would make me feel better.

Closing the Gender Gap in Computer Science infographic

I get email about posting things to my blog pretty regularly. Often the items have little or no relevance to my usual topics and I ignore them. Sometimes they are relevant, even very relevant. I know that some of them are at least in part “link bait” in which case I have to weight the pros of the link with the concern about where I am linking. For example I don’t know a whole lot about “Best Computer Science Schools”but I really like this infographic. So here it is. Doesn’t imply endorsement of “Best Computer Science Schools” as I don’t know enough about them to do so. But they include Jean Sammet who I admire so that is cool.

Source: Best Computer Science Schools

Interesting Links 21 October 2013

Windows 8.1 came out last week. I’ve updated one of my computers so far. Seems to go well so far. I’ll probably update the rest of my computers during the week. My school computers are still Windows 7 though. Hopefully that will change eventually. Anyway, I have a few good links to share.

Rebecca Dovi provides a CSTA Chapter Toolkit – a bunch of tools that are helpful for running a CSTA Chapter.

Are you interested in historical data about participation in the CS AP exam in your state? Check out this set of CS AP A exam data from 1998 to 2013 updated by Barb Ericson of Georgia Tech

Don Wettrick ‏@DonWettrick has started a new INternet radio podcast called InnovatED. His initial guest is Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher.

Did you know that you can apply now for the NCWIT Student Seed Fund, a $1k award for student-run programs promoting women in computing & IT?

Can you name the most popular programming languages? I got about about half of them. Just went blank on the rest.

Keith Ferrell @k_ferrell gives 5 Reasons to Teach Kids to Code 

Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher talks to Lou Zulli @lzulli on @bamradionetwork Computer Programming for All Students

Deadline for Proposals for CSTA Conference Approaching

The deadline for session and workshop proposals for the 2014 CSTA conference on K-12 computer science education is November 15, 2013.

In addition to 3-hour workshops and 1-hour sessions, this year's conference will include a limited number of 20-minute mini-sessions that focus on pedagogy and best teaching practices.

Proposals for all three session types must include:

• the names and contact information for all presenters
• an overview of the session
• a description of the intended audience (level, knowledge, …)
• a description of session activity (in sufficient detail for an informed decision)
• presenter background and presentation experience

All proposals must be submitted through the online symposium submission system that can be found at: https://www.softconf.com/d/csta2014

If you encounter a problem with the submission system, please contact Duncan Buell at buell@acm.org.

All proposals will be peer reviewed and submitters will be notified of a decision in early January 2014. Submissions will be evaluated on the following criteria:

• technical quality
• writing and presentation
• relevance to CSTA (focus on K-12 computer science or information technology)

Successful proposers should expect to be asked to submit a reasonably final copy of their presentation by June 8, 2014.

Additional conference details can be found at http://www.cstaconference.org.

We look forward to receiving your proposals and to your attendance at the symposium.

Career Technical Schools and Computer Science

Over the years I have gotten involved with a number of career technical schools in New England. Several in New Hampshire where I live and several in Massachusetts which is near by. This is fall advisory meeting season so I have attended several so far. Career technical programs are required to have advisory committees made up of people from industry and education to make sure the programs are current, meet student needs and generally prepare students for careers. that career piece is what makes programs in computing different in career technical schools from  more traditional “academic” high schools.

While most people think of career technical schools in terms of careers like auto shop, welding, agriculture, cosmetology and similar trades more and more of these school are adding more hi tech programs. Biotechnology and pre-engineering for example. And computing. Computing programs tend to be called “Programming and web development” rather than computer science. It’s the whole “learn a trade” thing I suspect. Ultimately though students in these programs learn a lot of computer science.

These programs do well with students who don’t always do well in traditional schools. The environment is different. It is more hands on and project based for one thing. It has a clear short term goal. Even the vocabulary is different. Students don’t work in a computer lab but work in a “shop.” The teachers generally have some experience in industry and that colors the way they teach and the way they design curriculum.

The programs I am advising generally have three year programs. Three full year programs. One doesn’t see that very often in traditional high schools. Students also generally learn multiple programming languages. Graduating with productive knowledge of three or four languages is common. The schools also work hard at finding the students co-op opportunities which place them in real world working environments which is itself a powerful learning experience. BTW if you are interested in hiring interns or other student workers in computing you should really look into a near by career technical school if there is one!

Of course many of these “programming and web development” students will go on to college. Many of them to community colleges in part because of academic records but often also because of money issues. There they will show up very much advanced over their peers from “college prep” high schools at least in computing. Not a bad thing.

These schools generally keep very current. They seldom teach the AP CS curriculum, finding it too limiting, but jump easily into things like cloud computing, mobile app development, and the latest in languages and operating systems. I haven’t visited a career tech program yet where the “shop” wasn’t running at least Windows 7. One I visited recently had a new shop where all of the computers ran with dual monitors which is a lot more like industry uses.

And the students! Highly motivated, hard working, and eager to learn. They are there because they want to be there. These are kids who would often be trying to learn on their own if these programs were not available to them. having the support of a teacher, curriculum and other resources no doubt moves them much faster, deeper and broader than they could learn on their own.

These schools are an under appreciated resource when we talk about computing education. They don’t show up on the APCS numbers which makes them almost invisible in some ways. The teachers are interested in learning new things but an AP CS prep course is not in that category so AP teachers may not run into them often. And yet they are preparing students that the AP CS students will be competing with for jobs. Given a choice between a student with a passing APCS score and a year long internship who do you think some hiring managers will look at first? I’ve talked to students co-oping at companies like IBM and Lincoln labs BTW. So these co-ops are not all with small operations.

Yes, I’m a fan. At a time when to many college prep high schools seem to be deemphasizing computing these career tech high schools are growing their “programming and web development” programs. They’re doing some good stuff!

AP Computer Science or AP Art History

The news came across my social media links that last year more students took the Advanced Placement Art History exam than took the AP Computer Science exam. Given how much better the job prospects are for computer scientists than for art historians this seems counter intuitive.

To those of us who are fans of computer science that more students take Art History than computer science just feels wrong somehow. It doesn’t quite seem logical.

There are several reasons why students take AP exams besides career interest of course. Several people have suggested that high school students take AP Art History in hopes of avoiding taking a similar course in university. Apparently AP US History is also one such course.  For others I am sure interest is a motivating factor. On the other hand I also suspect that a good Art History course can help build more interest in art. That makes taking art history a good thing beyond just avoiding one more general education requirement later on.

That building of interest is one reason I would like to see more students introduced to computer science at an earlier age. Not so that every student takes more computer science in university (though more should) but that they are at least able to develop a greater understanding of computer science and its role in their world.

Computer science is hard. We hear that a lot. That probably scares a lot of students away  from it. Especially in schools where AP CS is the first computer science course. that’s pretty understandable. Imagine taking AP Calculus without having any previous math courses!  APCS is a terrible first course in computer science. Terrible!

Computer science can and should be introduced to students long before we even suggest they take AP computer science. Computer science done right is fun, it’s exciting, it’s interesting, it’s full of WOW! But that’s not how we usually do it. I’ve written about the importance of the first CS course before of course. I feel strongly about it. I think we can do more than just whole courses though.

There are events that can at least start to build interest. Most of Microsoft’s Digigirlz events show off computer science well for girls. And they are fun! The upcoming Hour of Code program for Computer Science education week is designed to provide a fun successful exposure to computer science for a great many students all over the US.

We, for values of we that include people who want to see more students get involved in computer science, have to do more than just single events in a single week once a year though. There in lays the real challenge!

Interesting Links 14 October 2013

Last week was Leif Erikson Day. Today in the US we celebrate some Italian guy who came to North America later. So I have no school. I’ll take it. A lot of stuff to catch up on. Including looking though links like the ones I share below.

Educational Robots for Absolute Beginners, (a course for teachers and others interested)

Bookmark this page: List of free programming books via @github

Windows 8.1, HID and a Missile Launcher (OK maybe not if you are at a school with a zero tolerance for “weapons” that includes toy missiles.) (Channel 9) via @ch9  But some of us think this looks like fun.

Standardize Your (CS) World  some information about computer science and standards from the CSTA Blog via @csteachersa

Confessions of an Elementary Computer Science Teacher is yet another good blog post on the CSTA blog

Using Kinect for Winnows SDK v1.8 to add speech recognition to your next web app (via @ch9) Now that is an interesting idea. 

Databases - the next day more about the database unit that Mike Zamansky it running with his students. via @zamansky

Western New York CSTA Fall K-12 Teacher's Conference: WNY Computes May be of interest for CS teachers in and around Western New York State. 

Big Ideas Roundup  The latest update from Rebecca Dovi about her pilot course of Computer Science Principles. Follow Rebecca on Twitter https://twitter.com/Supercompsci

Round Up of Student Technology Competitions 2013 updated to include ACSL.

Chemistry, Computer Science and the Nobel Prize

There is no Nobel Prize in Computer Science. We do have the Turing Award which is as close as we get. It’s not as well known as the Nobel Prize though so when scientists get recognized by the Nobel Committee for work that is heavily involved in computing it is a big deal for those of us who care about computer science. That happened this week when three men were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Three win Nobel prize for taking chemistry into cyberspace

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, awarding the prize of 8 million crowns ($1.25 million) to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, said their work had effectively taken chemistry into cyberspace. Long gone were the days of modeling reactions using plastic balls and sticks.

"Today the computer is just as important a tool for chemists as the test tube," the academy said in a statement. "Computer models mirroring real life have become crucial for most advances made in chemistry today.

Computing is involved in pretty much all fields today. In many fields, Chemistry included, computing and software that helps with things like simulations makes a lot of research possible that would be otherwise impossible. Students who are interested in Science careers today really need to have some understanding of computer science. They are going to need it!

Computer Programming Is Women’s Work

When two related posts come though my screen at about the same time it always screams for me to write a blog post. That’s the case today as I saw Why schoolgirls are not interested in studying IT (thanks to a link from Mark Guzdial’s blog One schoolgirls’ story: Why schoolgirls are not interested in studying IT) and then from Twitter Computer Programming Used To Be Women’s Work.

The article on the Smithsonian about programming being women’s work has an interesting quote from Grace Hopper that really resonates with me.

Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.”

Planning meals is only one example. A short brainstorming session could easily come up with many examples of ways that we socialize women from a young age to plan things out and deal with coordination and scheduling. Boy? We don’t force them to do it quite so much. And yet men have gradually pushed women out of the field for which much of the rest of how we train women prepares them for.

In fact as the Smithsonian article points out:

According to test developers, successful programmers had most of the same personality traits as other white-collar professionals. The important distinction, however, was that programmers displayed “disinterest in people” and that they disliked “activities involving close personal interaction.” It is these personality profiles, says [historian Nathan] Ensmenger, that originated our modern stereotype of the anti-social computer geek.

This sort of thing created and reinforced the stereotype that Lottie McCrindell  writes about in the WITsend article.

I think of someone working in IT as male, old, bearded, not bothered about his clothes, his looks, or going outside. All his friends are boys and he's never had a girlfriend. He gets excited about new gadgets and he likes reading comics even though he's over 40, and he collects things, like little figures from games.

The stereotype that Lottie McCrindell is not near as true as she thinks it is. And she probably knows that at some level but how can she be sure? Who is going to tell her different? And let’s face it, telling her it is different is not enough. She needs to see it somehow.

This is why things like the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is so important. It shows women they are not alone. I love that more and more college women are attending. 

And for girls in secondary school the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Talent Development Initiative is a great program to encourage young women. I encourage my own female students to apply to the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing.  Microsoft has their DigiGirlz program which exposes girls to women in computing and shows them that the field is much more than the stereotype. We need to encourage young women who show interest and aptitude in the field. As with so many things we get what we reward!

These are great programs but there is still too much exclusion of women in the field that actually does happen. That has to change as well. I’m sick of reading stories of misogyny and harassment in the workplace. Not just in computing fields of course but in our connected online world those text examples get so much attention it has to discourage women. The industry has to get its act together. We can’t wait for enough women to get in and force the change. Rather we have to make the change to make the field more welcoming to women.

American Computer Science League (ACSL)

This was posted to the CSTA announcement list. I don’t have first hand experience but I hear good things.

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Computer contests for high school students are available in many varieties.   However, for those schools that annually compete in the American Computer Science League (ACSL), there is nothing BETTER.  Here are some reasons why:

•   ACSL offers all students exposure to foundational concepts in computer science that will serve them well in current high school and future college courses.
•   ACSL enables all students to compete with others at their grade level with similar programming experience by offering a Junior, Intermediate, and Senior Division.
• ACSL has provided newly written, never previously used, interesting short answer problems and programming problems every year since 1978.
• ACSL is administered in four local contests throughout the year at your school so that all of your students can participate either as part of their CS classes or as an extracurricular activity.
• ACSL offers a Classroom Division for students who want exposure to the concepts but without a programming problem.
• ACSL allows students to solve the programming problems using any language  their teacher allows.
• ACSL provides all preparation materials necessary, fast email responses to all inquiries, and follow-up feedback by posting top scores and sample programs.
• ACSL is on the Approved Activities List of the National Association of Secondary School Principals and run by current and former high school Computer Science teachers.
• ACSL is an institutional member of CSTA and will include a free contest CD in the registration for all new teams if the teacher or advisor is a CSTA member.
• ACSL sponsors an Invitational l All Star contest in a different city at the end of each year for qualifying teams. Prizes are awarded on a regional basis to top scoring students and teams in addition to winning schools after a full day of face-to-face team competition.
  

If you are interested in participating, please visit our web site: www.acsl.org
for more information. All questions about ACSL can be sent to Jerry Tebrow at jerry@acsl.org.

Interesting Links 7 October 2013

I’m staring off today with two other sets of links. Some good resource lists created by some friends of mine.

• Joe Kmoch has a great list of CS and IT educational resources that he has collected over time in a wiki at <http://csitresources.pbworks.com>
• Patrice Gans has a great list of resources for K-8 computer science organized by grade level as a Google Doc.

Michelle Lagos, International Representative to the CSTA Board of Directors has an interesting article called Confessions of an Elementary Computer Science Teacher about her experiences teaching CS in elementary school.

Congratulations to Mike @zamansky and @cstuyrun on coverage of the Saturday hack sessions for high schoolers! “It’s the first major effort to teach non-Stuyvesant students by his non-profit organization, “CSTUY," a name that reads as a play on Stuyvesant (called “Stuy” for short), but stands for Computer Science and Technology for Urban Youth.”

Students Are 'Hacking' Their School-Issued iPads: Good for Them by one of my favorite education journalists Audrey Watters in The Atlantic. If you’ve been reading about the 1:1 programs that are causing issues in some school districts this is a must read.

Program the Microsoft Kinect with Scratch is an interesting application of Kinect technology and the Scratch block programming environment created by Stephen Howell @saorog

Have you seen the new Kinect For Windows Library (including Kinect Web Applications) from Microsoft?

Teaching Problem Solving

One of the things we like to say learning computer science in general and programming in particular leads to is learning problem solving. It’s a nice theory and I’ve said it myself. It’s really more complicated than that of course. A student can learn all the syntax for a programming language but that doesn’t make them a problem solver. Not automatically. What I see all too often is a student who can create, for example, a loop on a test or tell me what a loop does but still has trouble applying the right tool (like that loop) to a new problem.

Problem solving is largely about taking one idea or concept and applying it to a problem that is completely new to the problem solver. It is about saying something like “x worked for problem a and problem b is similar to problem a so x may work here.” It seems simple and obvious to state. In reality sometimes it takes a bit of perception to see that problems a and b have base similarities behind superficial differences. Other times a solution requires parts of solutions for several different problems put together in a new or unique way. Visualizing those more complex solutions can be difficult. This is especially true for people with limited understanding of the tools available to them. (Note: I talked about this a bit in Hammers and Nails and Writing Complicated Code)

The problem that is keeping me awake lately is how to teach that sort of problem solving. How do I teach how to see the problem in a way that makes it more clear which tools should be considered?  It’s vitally important to me to do this better than I have been doing.

Some students “get this” easily and early. Some people have more of knack for problem solving than others. To some extent I think this is a visualization problem. It depends on how people picture a problem in their mind and how they relate different problem images to others. On one hand some people just see solutions pop into their heads and go do it. On the other hand are people for whom dealing without a clearly laid out, step by step set of instructions makes a task all but impossible. It’s like people bringing IKEA furniture home. Some can look at the picture on the box and see in their mind how it comes together. Others need that step by step set of instructions and can’t imagine how it all comes together until it is done.

What I am thinking about now is discussion a lot of different problems in a semi-abstract way and seeing if I can get students to start visualizing how to solve them. Perhaps is the see a bunch of related problems they can start to better extrapolate to new problems. The idea being the more uses for tools they are exposed to the better they will become at looking at future problems. It’s one thought. I’m trying hard to come up with more ideas..

And I am open to suggestions. How do you teach problem solving to your students?

Spirit of Innovation Challenge

A new competitive event for students via this announcement from the CSTA mailing list.

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>The Spirit of Innovation Challenge is an excellent way to help your students channel their creative thinking and demonstrate their knowledge. The annual program is a multi-phase, business and technical plan competition, free and open to students ages 13 - 18 from around the world. The program invites teens to work in teams of 2-5 students and use science, technology, engineering and math skills along with creativity, collaboration and entrepreneurship to develop innovative products and services to benefit humanity and address global sustainability.

The first round submission can be completed in less than five hours from start to finish. The deadline for the 2013-2014 one-page abstract qualification round is Oct. 24.Not sure you have all the tools needed for your team to be successful? The Spirit of Innovation Challenge provides free access to mentors, webinars and forums to answer all your questions.

Join today at www.ConradAwards.org, or email us for more information at  info@conradawards.org.

CS Ed Week and an Hour of Code are coming

An announcement for Hadi Partovi, founder of code.org, about Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 9-15) and the Hour of Code initiative.

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To celebrate Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 9-15), Code.org and dozens of supporting partners are organizing the largest initiative of its kind: a campaign to get 10 million students of all ages to try computer science for one hour. I’m writing to ask your help.

What is the Hour of Code? No experience needed

It’s a one-hour intro to CS -- on a browser, smartphone, or unplugged. We expect teachers from all disciplines to host it in classrooms, and we’ll provide tutorials that require no prior experience. We’ll announce an amazing list of partners over the coming weeks, but we need your help.

Recruit your entire school to participate

Most students are intimidated by CS; this campaign is a chance to inspire them to try. Please recruit your principal and other teachers to get involved. Share this brochure, or this homemade how-to video. Or get creative and define your own “Hour of Code” activities. More info

Prizes for EVERY Educator!

Every educator who hosts an Hour of Code will get a gift of 10GB of free DropBox storage. And I will personally donate a full class-set of laptops to one school in every state that hosts an Hour of Code for all its grades. Just register your school’s participation by Nov. 1 to qualify.

Please, start planning now and help make a difference.
Thanks for your support,
Hadi Partovi
Founder, Code.org
Hadi_Partovi@code.org

Flipping The Computer Science Classroom

I’m a bit of a “flipped classroom” skeptic. Let’s just get that our of the way up front. But I want to get my thinking out there in hopes that people will educate me on the whole idea.

To me it seems a lot like “read this chapter and we’ll discuss it tomorrow” but with videos in place of reading chapters. That seldom seems to work well in my experience. A few kids, maybe, do the reading while the rest expect to pick it up via osmosis or something. Or from class discussion. But most will miss out on a lot.

Yes, I know I hear stories of it working great but I don’t really understand how teachers get kids to watch the videos. What’s the secret? Do I have to be a real rock star presenter? If so, I’m in trouble.

The computer science class is different in many ways from other classes as well. In college we heard lectures and then went on our own to work on lab exercises. If the lecture was replaced by videos what would be the point of having classes? Just to ask questions about the videos? Maybe that works in college. College students are more likely to do the work at home (or dorm as the case may be.)

In high school we tend to have classes that are part lecture and part lab. A lot of the learning goes on in the lab time with students asking questions and getting one on one attention when they don’t understand things. At first glance this seems like a natural for flipping the classroom. Use videos that students watch at home and then have more time for labs. Sounds great. Well except for that whole “will kids really watch” and if they do will the videos be enough? And I have enough trouble getting kids to ask for clarification of ideas during in person lectures. Will they do it after watching a video?

I like the idea of videos for review. I’ve been recording some (see Videos for My C# Class if you are curious) and at least one student has viewed some of them. Stats show not many more than that. But that one student did tell me he found them useful and that he appreciated that I had put them out there. So that’s good. My hope is that a course set will make my life easier going forward. But depending on them to replace interactive lectures I’m not so sure about.

Anyone reading this using a flipped CS classroom? How do you get students to watch the videos? How to you handle your class time? What makes it work for you?

Interesting Links 30 September 2013

If you are a regular (or irregular) reader of my blog here I hope you will do me the honor of taking a few minutes to respond to a short survey I created last week. It is at http://sdrv.ms/177xb96  I thank you for you time and your readership. Here now the more interesting links.

Don’t forget that NCWIT is looking for high school girls with tech and computing aspirations for their 2013 NCWIT Aspirations Award: That is one of several items covered in my recent  Round Up of Student Technology Competitions 2013

Interesting things for students in New York City. Introducing CSTUY Hacking Sessions  for HS juniors and seniors in NYC. Also Brooklyn Robot Foundry - NYC's only robot building utopia for kids! On the web at http://brooklynrobotfoundry.com and on Twitter at  @robotfoundry

Kinect for Windows  Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) (Channel 9)  via @ch9

A supercomputer in your pocket [infographic] Wish I could get a good size print out for my lab.

The Purple Voice is Going Green  The Computer Science Teacher newsletter going to e publication.

Binary Flippy Do - How To Rebecca Dovi explains how she teaches Binary numbers with a sort of flip chart.

Student Tech Squad One of the best things for any district tech program.

2013 Blog Reader Survey

It’s been a while since I tried to collect any data about who reads my blog and why. When someone pointed out to me that Skydrive has the ability to create web surveys I saw that as a chance to kill two birds with one stone – try out a new thing and gather data on who is reading my blog.

If you are a reader of my blog - regularly or occasionally - I hope you will help me out by taking the following quick survey. No personal information is captured but there is also room for making suggestions for how I can improve.

http://sdrv.ms/177xb96

Hammers and Nails and Writing Complicated Code

The ability of students to find complex solutions to simple problems is a constant source of amusement and amazement. I’m probably neither the first or last teacher to make that observation.

One of the great things about programming is that there are usually many ways to solve the same problem. Of course the goal is always to find the fastest and most easy to understand solution. What I have noticed from my students lately is that they often tend to focus on the tools they understand the best and try to use them in places where they are not always ideal.

What I am seeing recently is that some kids really "get" while loops and other really "get" for loops. So they sometimes use while loops when a for would be easier and for when while would be easier. Using the type they are more comfortable with often means they have to add complexity.

For example I had a student create a for statement with a pretty complicated evaluation in the middle. The initialization looked typical as did the incrimination at the end. The comparison in the middle though checked two different conditions neither of which was related to the loop control value. Index out of range errors almost inevitably followed. Adding a third condition will fix the problem but really the problem called for a while loop.

Likewise some students seem to love to use while loops to initialize arrays when a for just strikes me as more natural and less complicated to set up. There is nothing intrinsically world with these various solutions. They just sometimes require some modifications that make the program a little more confusing. Confusion is code is almost never a good idea.

I don’t blame students for these things. For most it is a lack of experience at looking at the problem and spending the time to find the simplest solution. Students just seem to want to start writing code and making it up as they go along. Their natural inclination when something goes wrong is to add more code. Sometimes that is what is needed but often times what they really need to do is redesign the code and approach it from a different direction.

They’re going to invent things that are new to them because they haven’t seen enough other ways to do things. Complexity seems like the answer because simplification seems, to the inexperienced programmer, to be the path away from completion.

Eugene Wallingford tweeted the other day that “In practice, simplifying a sentence almost always makes it better.” I replied that the same is usually true with code and he agreed. We tend to teach students that more words is better. Better in research papers for example. I had a student turn in an essay with a 95 word sentence not that long ago. I’m pretty sure that would have been better as several smaller sentences. Likewise breaking code down into smaller segments and keeping those segments as small and tight as possible usually makes them better.

Simplification is something we have to teach. using multiple tools and methods to solve problems is something we also have to teach. We need students to be comfortable with multiple tools so that they are ready, willing, and able to use the best tool for the job.

Round Up of Student Technology Competitions 2013

I’ve written about a number of technology competitions and award programs for students in the last month or so. I thought that a single post on them might be useful. So here we go.

The NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing program. This program recognizes high school young women for their interest and aptitude in technology.  Aspirations in Computing currently offers over 300K in scholarships for young women in computing. You can learn more at aspirations.org.


The Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s big international competition and challenges for students. The three main competitions are back for 2014: Games, Innovation, and World Citizenship. And once again the prizes are substantial: $50,000 to the first-place team in each competition! All of the rules for 2014 are available now and there are a lot of changes, so please take a look.

American Computer Science League (ACSL)

 ACSL organizes computer science contests and computer programming contests for junior and senior high school students. This year, our 36th year of continuous operation, over 200 teams in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia are participating. ACSL is on the approved activities list of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP). ACSL is also an institutional member of the Computer Science Teachers Association.

  The 2013 IBM Master the Mainframe Contest is now open!  This year, the IBM Academic Initiative System z team is giving away over $53,000 in prizes, including Google Nexus 10 tablets, expenses-paid trips, custom T-shirts, and a ton of swag! Plus, tons of great technical challenges to give your students hands-on experience and sought-after skills.  Students who complete the first two parts of the contest will gain hands-on experience with four different operating systems!


Specifically focusing on middle school and high school-age participants, the Verizon Innovative App Challenge, which launched in 2012, is a collaborative competition created to encourage students’ interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). 
This second Verizon Innovative App Challenge, which offers up to $20,000 grants for winning schools and a Samsung Galaxy Tab for each winning team member, has also been designed to engage students, provide them with valuable new skills and experiences and open their eyes to exciting new possibilities in STEM for their futures.

The Spirit of Innovation Challenge is an excellent way to help your students channel their creative thinking and demonstrate their knowledge. The annual program is a multi-phase, business and technical plan competition, free and open to students ages 13 - 18 from around the world. The program invites teens to work in teams of 2-5 students and use science, technology, engineering and math skills along with creativity, collaboration and entrepreneurship to develop innovative products and services to benefit humanity and address global sustainability.
I blogged about them individually here:

• Verizon App Challenge - for middle and high school students
• IBM Master the Mainframe 2013
• Thinking About the 2014 Imagine Cup
• NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing Starting Again
• Spirit of Innovation Challenge 
• American Computer Science League 

Verizon App Challenge - for middle and high school students

This was posted to the AP Computer Science mailing list. I thought it was worth posting here for people not on that list. Looks interesting.

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Introducing the Second Verizon Innovative App Challenge

Specifically focusing on middle school and high school-age participants, the Verizon Innovative App Challenge, which launched in 2012, is a collaborative competition created to encourage students’ interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).  As we are all aware, student achievement in STEM is critical to U.S. economic growth and competitiveness on the global stage. Last year, over 1,000 schools from every state and Washington DC registered for the Verizon Innovative App Challenge and over 470 teams submitted app concepts that solved for social issues. More so, over 3,000 students were engaged in this challenge and over 50% of the winning team members were girls. Winning teams presented their apps at the 2013 Technology Student Association National Conference in Orlando, FL in June.

This second Verizon Innovative App Challenge, which offers up to $20,000 grants for winning schools and a Samsung Galaxy Tab for each winning team member, has also been designed to engage students, provide them with valuable new skills and experiences and open their eyes to exciting new possibilities in STEM for their futures.

Here’s how it works.

Working with a faculty advisor, students in teams of 5 will develop an original concept for a mobile app that incorporates STEM and addresses a real need or problem in their school or community.  Because students are judged solely on their submission of a unique and creative concept, we hope to pique the interest of those who otherwise would not participate in a technology challenge. Registration for the Challenge opens on September 3^rd, 2013 and all submissions must be completed by December 3^rd, 2013.

The Verizon Innovative App Challenge is proudly sponsored by the Verizon Foundation in partnership with the Technology Student Association (TSA) and Samsung.

For more information see http://appchallenge.tsaweb.org

Sometimes You Have to Slow Down

I was helping a student today and realized that he’d been “lost” for a while. I was going pretty quickly and everyone seemed to be keeping up just fine. Not this student. And truth be told I had become suspicious that a couple of other students were having trouble as well. Sure a couple of kids did the project I was giving them three class periods to do in one period. But other were asking a lot of questions I really hadn’t expected.

I asked the student why he hadn’t asked more questions and received an answer that is far too typical. “I was the only one who was lost and I didn’t want to ask questions in front of everyone else.” I think about half the class may have been doing the same thing – assuming that they were the only one not keeping up and so being embarrassed to ask a question. I don’t blame the students. They are young and that is how things are when you are young. I blame myself for not noticing.

Sometimes we get caught up in our lectures, demos and explanations and our pride kicks in. “I’m doing wonderful. Everyone gets it.” I should know better. A lack of questions is a bad thing not a good thing. Asking questions of students and getting good answers back, if only from a few, lets us kid ourselves into believing that everyone gets it. It’s what we want to believe.

In some ways it’s worse the better we, the teachers, know the material. I could do this stuff in my sleep. Everything I am teaching I have done uncountable times over 40 years. It’s clear as day to me. Why wouldn’t it be clear to young people who have never seen anything like it in their lives? Oh right. Coding is a whole new way of thinking for them. That’s why!

So tonight I am thinking about two things. One is how will I do this different next semester to avoid this problem. Well, mitigate it at least. More importantly how do I back up, slow down and move forward bringing everyone with me this time? Getting truly amazing programs from the students who have more background in coding or who somehow get it easily is nice but that is not what good teaching is about. Anyone can teach the so-called smart kids.

Good teaching is about bringing along the students who don’t come by it easily. Good teaching is about seeing how doesn’t get it the first time and finding a second or third or more way until you find a way that they can get it. Tomorrow I try to be a good teacher.

Interesting Links 23 September 2013

This weeks quote of the week is from Vicki Davis ‏@coolcatteacher who Tweeted “I don't want my students to buy the apps - I want them to make them.” Isn’t that what most of use want? Students who are creators and not just consumers.

Kinect Games, xGames and TouchDevelop is a post by David Renton which lists a lot of the educational resources he has available on those three topics.

Something a bit different. Perhaps for more advanced students. An Excel Turing Machine Yep, someone created a version of the Turning Machine using Microsoft Excel. You can get a copy and/or read how they did it.

Yep, another competition for students. The Cyber Patriot competition now open. For middle school too.

CyberPatriot is the premier national high school cyber defense competition created by the Air Force Association to inspire high school students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines critical to our nation’s future.

I wrote a post for Connected Learning Today called the Education Wow Factor about trying to get kids to say “oh wow” followed by “How can I do that?”

Can you guess the programming language by reading a  “Hello, world!” snippet? There are a lot of languages out there. Some of them look pretty weird to me. Others seem to look the same as each other.

I liked a @YouTube video from Chris Winikka @winikka called Intro to Visual C# Programming Part 1 Chris took a workshop I lead a number of years ago. He’s doing some great stuff now. Probably only coincidence that he took a workshop with me though.

In Boredom Could Kill On-line Programming Education Garth Flint  @gflint comments on some online educational sites. We need to look at these sites with a critical eye to make sure they have the value that their creators hope they have.

Imagining an Imagine Cup project with Kinect? The latest SDK 1.8 update is here and ready for download: http://spr.ly/6017wv29 I’ve started to play with this myself. Some great sample code is included.

September 2013 brought us a Special Issue of IEEE Computer on Computing Education.

A new project, Google's Coder project turns the Raspbery Pi into a mini app server. May have to try this myself.

A Missile Commander Game - a Small Basic Featured Program continues to show off how powerful Small Basic is in spite of its name.

Cloud at ECOO13  via Doug Peterson @DougPete ECOO 13 looks like a great conference for Ontario (and area) educators.

Become a session or workshop presenter at the 2014 CSTA annual conference July 14-15 in St. Charles, IL!

Master the Mainframe 2013

Something different. Something from IBM.   A teacher friend of mine forward the following announcement the other day. This contest is open to high school and university students in the U.S. and Canada (excluding Quebec).  Sorry Quebec. I know that some high school students have done this in the past and learned a lot. The mainframe is not completely dead and will likely never be truly dead. An experience like this will set students apart from the crowd.

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Registration for the 2013 IBM Master the Mainframe Contest is now open!  This year, the IBM Academic Initiative System z team is giving away over $53,000 in prizes, including Google Nexus 10 tablets, expenses-paid trips, custom T-shirts, and a ton of swag! Plus, tons of great technical challenges to give your students hands-on experience and sought-after skills.  Students who complete the first two parts of the contest will gain hands-on experience with four different operating systems!

Visit our 2013 Master the Mainframe Contest homepage for details.  Students can access the simple registration form from that page. 

We also put a link to a printable PDF flyer on the homepage to help promote the contest to your students - the perfect accessory for any bulletin board!

The contest, which begins on October 7, is an educational tool that progresses in difficulty and prize value as contestants complete a variety of tasks, logging into a remote mainframe system from their own workstations.

This year, the custom Master the Mainframe Contest T-shirt (the prize for being among the first 2,600 contestants to complete Part 1) will feature "tour dates" on the back, which will match the hometowns of the 50 schools that have the most registrants as of October 7. 

You can connect with other students and educators, and keep up with the latest contest announcements, on our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/MasterTheMainframe

Students will also be encouraged to use their mainframe skills to help them apply for the jobs on our System z Job Board at systemzjobs.com.

Our team hopes to see your students Mastering the Mainframe this fall.  Best wishes for a successful semester!

Videos for My C# Class

I've been creating short videos for my honors programming class. They are short and intended for my students to use for review. I’m not saying they are great but since there are up on YouTube I thought that a post with a sort of index to them would be useful for me, for my students and possibly other people. I’ll update this post as I add videos.

• Hello World Console Demo The basic "Hello World" application
• Scope of Variables An introduction covering module level, class level and block level scope.
  
• For Loop Coding Demo The basic for loop is created and demonstrated
• Do While Coding Demo How is a Do While loop set up and used
  
• While Loop Coding Demo Yep, this one is about the While loop
• If Else Statements Inside Loops Using if statements inside a loop. A block in a block
  
• Nested For Loops For loops one inside another.
• Sequential search though an array of unsorted data

Thinking About the 2014 Imagine Cup

One of the things I was responsible for while I was working at Microsoft was promoting the Imagine Cup competitions. I did that pretty well. I like the competition and think that is is generally a good thing. Now I am back in the classroom and thinking about trying to see if I can get some students to form a team. Were I in the college/university environment this would be a no brainer. I’d be pushing it all out. For high school students I’m still trying to make up my mind.
The thing is that high school kids don’t have as much time as university students do. Nor do my students have quite the backgrounds in development that an upper class university CS major has let alone a graduate student in CS. So winning is a reach goal. Though there have been some high school teams reach the US finals in the game division a couple of times so it is not completely out of reach. So much depends on student motivation though. And since this does not fit neatly into my classes which are single semester ones applying external motivation is tough.
I think it would be good for them to try though. Probably in the game competition if anything. High school students are more ready for that one than the others. Plus I have a couple of Kinects and a bunch of Xbox game controllers we could use. Maybe I could try and get them to create a Pitch Video as well.
In the next few days I’ll start talking to students in my honors programming class and in the AP CS course. We’ll see if there is interest.

Interesting Links 16 September 2013

Well I was able to blog more often last week. Paying a bit for it as I had a ton of grading to do over the weekend. When inspiration (or something that feels like it) strikes I blog. Grading is less fun though more important.

Tops in my links today are some calls for participation. Deadlines for submitting proposals to present at conferences come early. ISTE and CSTA are already open. I’m definitely submitting something for CSTA. Thinking about ISTE as I believe we need a lot more computer science talks there in order to make it the sort of conference that is really useful for CS educators.

Visit http://www.cstaconference.org to learn how to become a session or workshop presenter at the 2014 CSTA annual conference July 14-15 in St. Charles, IL! This is the best conference for K-12 CS teachers going and you want to take part in some way or other.

The ISTE call for participation is also open at https://www.isteconference.org/2014/program/participate.php The more people who propose CS related sessions the more CS sessions we are likely to be able to get. If you are doing something cross curricula you will doubly want to propose a session on that.

Posters are out for the 2013-14 Award for Aspirations in Computing - download here.

I found a couple of lists of resources for teaching programming that are worth a look: 

• Teach kids programming
• 20 Sites/Apps for Learning how to Program or Code

Last week was programmers day -  100th day of the year - in Hex of course. It’s the 256th (or 2⁸) day of the year in decimal.

A couple of blog posts from the Computer Science Teachers Association you should know about. 

• CSTA Voice Moving to E-Distribution The Voice is the CSTA newsletter
• Barriers to More CS Teaching and Learning in Schools  

A Missile Commander Game - Small Basic Featured Program

Finishing up with something for the serious math and crypto geeks - XORShift random number generators in Java: 

Women in Computing–An Image To Think About

Picture from the Facebook page of www.ilovesmartwomen.com

What Are People Better At (Than Computers)

I love xkcd. It’s probably the nerdiest comic strip around. Recently the following strip appeared.

I think that people are still better at creating comic strips than computers. I think we’re also still a whole lot better at writing computer programs. The long predicted day of self programming computers doesn’t really seem that much closer today then it did when I first discussed the possibility in university 40 years ago. We’ll probably get there some day. Maybe.
There is also a sort of philosophical question here as well. What does it really mean when a computer is “better” at a game than people? If by “better” one means that the computer can beat any human every or even most times does that really diminish the value of the game? Probably not.
Ultimately we play games to entertain ourselves. Losing all the time tends to be less entertaining than winning at least some of the time. Although if I only enjoyed Words with Friends when I won I would have had to stop playing a while ago.   There is the aspect of getting better and of pushing oneself to improve that can make a game more interesting over time. We don’t stop playing games with our peers just because professionals are a lot better than we are either. I’m never going to beat Tiger Woods at golf but I have a hope (slim perhaps but real) that one day I may beat my son.
We play games not because we are perfect at them but because we are not perfect at them. If we got a hole in one on every shot in golf we’d either stop playing or we’d make the game harder. After all if all we wanted to do was put the ball in a hole we could walk over to the green and drop the ball from hand to hole. That’s not what games are all about though.
In one sense trying to write a computer program that is perfect at a game is a game itself. It is one layer of abstraction away from participation in the game ourselves.
Two years ago the robotics team (FIRST Robotics Team 811) at my school built a robot that could pick up small basketballs, find the basket (using a camera tuned to special reflected tape) and shoot the baskets at the hoop. It was remarkably good at scoring. The challenge was more in getting the robot to work than in playing a game of basketball against people. There was more to the competition than just shooting baskets and there was a role for humans to play which made it a real game BTW. A competition among robots that shot perfect shots every time would have lacked some drama I think. Though if the robots were less than perfect it would have been a game but it still would have been between programmers and not their robot proxies.
Ultimately getting a computer to play the perfect game of Go (or chess or even tic tac toe) is not a win for computers but for the people who create the software. It’s a reason for humans to feel better rather than worse about themselves.

1000 Robots for An Hour of Code

BirdBrain Technologies has announced their intention to lend out 1,000 Finch robots as their contribution to this year's Computer Science Education Week and Code.org's Hour of Code initiative.
The Finch robot grew out of some efforts at Carnegie Mellon University and was designed specifically for educational use. BirdBrain will provide lesson plans as well as the robots for qualifying schools and other educational organizations. Full details are available at the BirdBrain blog.
Please APPLY HERE for your organization by 11:59 PM, October 4th.

Harassment in the Computer Science Classroom

Two interesting and initially unrelated links came across my computer screen in the past couple of days. One was an image that said “Everyone talks about leaving a better planet for our children. Why doesn’t anyone try to leave better children for our planet.”  One of my teacher friends pointed out that as teachers that second part is how most of us see our jobs. The second link was basically a story of a teacher not doing enough to leave better children for our planet. To my daughter's high school programming teacher That is the story of a teacher letting the boys in a programming class harass the lone girl in the class.

It is a story of not enough being done to leave better children for our planet in general and a field I care deeply about in particular. Now the teachers I know all care deeply about creating a welcoming and comfortable environment for all of their students regardless of gender or race or religion or anything else. CSTA Conferences are loaded with sessions on bringing more underserved students into the classroom and making them comfortable. The same is true of SIGCSE and other conferences. So what is going wrong?

There is an certain segment of the population that is willing to write harassment off as “boys being boys.” And perhaps others think that the business world of computing is tough so girls should learn to get rough before they get there. To me that goes against the idea of education which I see as trying to fix what is broken in society rather than to perpetuate it.

The “to my daughter’s programming teacher” post has some good suggestions for teachers. Setting the tone is a key one in my opinion. We as teachers have to make it known from day one that programming is not just a guy thing and that women are every bit as good at it as men are. We have to be aware of what is going on in class and take action when/if someone is being made to feel uncomfortable. Talking to students helps here. We can’t just let things happen.

I’d like to finish with the caption of one other image that came by recently. “Hug a teacher. They are the only ones standing between us and a future full of morons.” It may be that teachers of computer science are the first line of defense against a future full of misogynous “brogrammers” who make the field uncomfortable for a wide range of people whose ideas and input we really need.

CSTA 2014 CALL FOR PROPOSALS

CSTA members (you are a member right?) should have seen this in their email. The CSTA annual conference is in my humble opinion the single best professional development experience for K-12 computer science teachers. Please think about proposing a workshop or session or at least attending.

The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) invites you to participate in the 14th Annual CSTA Conference. This event will be held July 14-15, 2014, in St. Charles, Illinois (just outside Chicago).

The CSTA 2014 Program Committee seeks proposal submissions related to the practice of teaching and learning computer science and information technology in K–12. In addition to 3-hour workshops and 1-hour sessions, this year's conference will include a limited number of 20-minute mini-sessions that focus on pedagogy and best teaching practices.  Proposals for all three session types must include:

• the names and contact information for all presenters
• an overview of the session
• a description of the intended audience (level, knowledge, …)
• a description of session activity (in sufficient detail for an informed decision)
• presenter background and presentation experience

Presenters will have the use of a computer projector and screen.  If additional equipment or facilities are required, this should be clearly requested in the proposal; it may be possible to accommodate such requests but this cannot be guaranteed.Presenters will be required to pay for their conference registration.

All proposals will be submitted through the online symposium submission system that can be found at https://www.softconf.com/d/csta2014. If you encounter a problem with the submission system, please contact Duncan Buell at buell@acm.org.

The deadline for proposals is November 15, 2013. Review of proposals will occur shortly thereafter and notification of a decision will be made around January 1, 2014.  All submission will be evaluated on the following criteria:

• technical quality
• writing and presentation
• relevance to CSTA (focus on K-12 computer science or information technology)

Successful proposers should expect to be asked to submit a reasonably final copy of their presentation by June 8, 2014.

Additional conference details can be found at http://www.cstaconference.org.

We look forward to receiving your proposals and to your attendance at the symposium.

Interesting Links 9 September 2013

Busy week for me. Lots of stuff going on at school. Seems like the first few weeks of school wear me out no matter how hard I try to be prepared. I have fewer links than normal. I also posted fewer posts last week than normal. We’ll have to see how this week goes.
The ISTE call for participation is open - https://www.isteconference.org/2014/program/participate.php We need people to submit computer science talks!
Videos of many conference sessions from the 2013 CSTA Conference are now available! This was a great conference so if you missed it or missed sessions you were interested in you can watch them online now.
How Carnegie Mellon Increased the Proportion of Women in Computer Science From 7% to 42% Some advice here for more universities. Some of these ideas (support groups for girls for example) would be worth trying in high schools as well.
Very Young Programmers on the NY Times. Young means younger than 8. Wondering about this.
Rob Miles talks about one of the more obscure C# syntax features at  What does ?? mean in C# I’m probably going to skip talking about this one in my lower level courses. Too much thinking is involved. Still it is an interesting feature that could be useful in some applications.

The Most Successful Computer Scientist in the World

During a class discussion last week one of my students asked me “Who is the most successful computer scientist in the world?” Whoa! What a question. I started my reply with “it all depends on how you measure success.” Success means a lot of different things to different people.

If you measure it by money then Bill Gates is probably the one. But I suspect that Bill Gates would rather be remembered for his philanthropy than for his work at Microsoft. At least at this stage in his life. If you are a theoretical CS person then winning being awarded the Turing Prize would be a good measure of success. While a number of them are well off I don’t think any of them are in the billionaire range. But they sure are successful in the opinions of many.

What then is success in computer science? I doubt there is one answer. There are probably as many answers as there are people in computer science. I told my students if at the end of the course they were not turned off to computer science I would call that some success on my part. If they were more interested in CS after the course and before that would be big success.

I gave up on getting rich a long time ago. The price of riches is too high in too many ways for me. I once heard someone say that being able to afford both the time and money for a weekly one hour massage was success. Financially I think that is about right. Being able to do the things you like is success.

There is a great cartoon strip that has been making the rounds on the Internet the last few days. Words by Bill Watterston and drawing by Gavin Aung Than. Check it out.

Interesting Links 2 September 2013

It’s Labor Day in the US and schools are closed here. It’s actually the fourth day in a four day weekend for my school. Some how it always feels like this lets us ease into a full five day a week school schedule.

I found this post by a pro developer on The importance of comments just after I started talking about commenting code with my honors programming students. Looking forward to using some of the examples in it with my students.

"From Hello World to Lightsabers in 60 minutes" is about using a Kinect sensor to create an application that virtually push a light sabre in a person’s hand Looks like fun.

I have started making occasional contributions to Connect Learning Today which is an education technology site run by my friend Ken Royal. My first post there is titled Beyond Teaching Computer Science.

Watch this new TouchDevelop video by the development team’s(former) intern Mikhail Belyaev as he walks you through all basic and advanced debugging in TouchDevelop.

Video of NSF’s Jan Cuny talking about broadening participation in computing at the AP Annual Conference: http://youtu.be/LG7CJOWtWY0?t=31m27s

My friend’ Pat Yongpradit spoke in the keynote about Computational Thinking at the @CollegeBoard's AP Annual Conference at this link: http://youtu.be/LG7CJOWtWY0?t=21m42s

The Scratch Team announced the release of the beta version of the Scratch 2.0 Offline Editor. It currently works only on Mac and Windows. You can install it and find out more here: http://scratch.mit.edu/scratch2download/

My post on Windows 8 Game Development Links has been  updated with a new link specifically the latest post by Tara Walker. Building a Shooter Game Walkthrough – Part 6: Creating Enemies and Detecting Collisions

How Google Glass Disrupts The Sports Image Monopoly

I was attending a golf tournament this weekend. So naturally my thoughts turned to technology. Yes it was everywhere. But the most disruptive technology was in taking pictures and videos. There were a lot of people telling people not to take pictures. To put away the cell phone. The PGA doesn’t want anyone taking pictures, video or even audio of the event other than accredited photo journalists and the TV company with a contract to broadcast the event. Why? To preserve the value of the images and especially the broadcast rights of the event. They make serious money off of these things.

IN fact pretty much any sporting event one attends has restrictions on photography or even the broadcasting of status and events as they occur. Check your tickets – it’s there. The organizers want to have a monopoly on the information so that people have to buy tickets or watch coverage that someone pays the league/organizers to present. Technology is already starting to impinge on that monopoly.

For all the people watching and telling people to put their phones away people were still getting images and posting them live on the Internet. Shocking I know. People ignoring what is in theory a contract not to do so. One could get into all sorts of discussion of why that is involving ego and people not understanding why the rules are there but it is all besides the point. The point is that technology is making this all too easy to stop. Google Glass and the inevitable follow ons from other companies are going to make this that much more of a problem for the sports monopolies.

I suspect that at some point they will wake up and outright ban Google Glass in many venues. This will start a technology way which the content providers will ultimately and invariably lose. This is probably not going to completely blow up the model of course. People will still pay for the close-up shots that only a high powered camera in a tower or a crane can provide. They will still pay for the commentary. And the information about how far away from the hole the ball is. People are not going to be satisfied with the images from small personal portable devices. But fear will drive the monopolies to try to stop it. That is exactly the wrong thing to do though.

The smart monopolies will create apps for these devices and sell subscription services for them. People at the event are going to be very likely to be willing to pay for information being streamed right to their eyeballs using their Google Glass. At an event like the Deutsche Bank Championship (where I was this weekend) they can’t afford to put bit LED signs at every hole and at every viewing sport. But using the networking they must all ready be setting up they could stream that information to people wearing Glass with subscription services.

Ball parks could do the same at baseball games, soccer games, and pretty much anything else. Augmented Reality could really change the way people at a live event watched a live event. And make people money. The question is will companies see the value of a new revenue model or fight to hold on to an old model in a losing battle?