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.

The Problem Of Cheating on Programming Projects

This seems to be the year a lot of people are really getting concerned about cheating on computer science programming projects. There has been some discussion of the issue on one of the mailing lists I am on. Garth Flint blogged about it at Finding cool projects for programming classes. And I caught a student searching for exercise solutions for Code.Org’s AP CS Principles course work.

Of course cheating on programming projects is nothing new. I know that people shared punch cards back in the early days. Yeah, I’ve been around a while. I have also caught students sharing code via Google Docs. With the tools we have today, cheating has never been easier. Solutions to popular coding projects are easily available on the Internet and found using search engines.

It’s amazing that students don’t think teachers can recognize and then find solutions that a student copied from the network. We can and we do.

One common refrain I hear is that professionals get code off the Internet. And they do. GitHub is all about sharing and reusing code. StackOverflow and sites like it are were professional and amateurs find solutions to their problems and use them. It is considered good practice to use these tools. But school is different.

School is about learning and projects are assigned both to provide practice and to evaluate what students have learned. Students have a tendency to grab code they don’t understand and try to shoehorn it into a project. Or to copy a while project and turn it in as their own. Interviews can usually determine is a student understands what they used or not.

Ideally though, students would only hand in their own individual work. That is better than catching them and docking them points. Today’s students have more pressure to get good grades and (apparently) less understanding of the correlation between knowledge of the material and those good grades.

Garth wrote in his blog about trying to come up with unique projects that don’t have solutions on the Internet already. That’s hard. It seems like a lot of us teachers think of the same projects. Or we get them from third party curriculum and textbooks. Once a project is in wide use solutions will appear on the Internet pretty quickly.  Even if a teacher does come up with a project that can’t be found on the Internet, if you have one really bright student who is willing to share their solution you can have cheating.

The only thing I can think of is making the issue part of a discussion of ethics and the meaning of school. Using code from the Internet correctly requires that students actually understand what they are using.  Students who cheat their way through are going to find themselves in a bind eventually. If not in post secondary school than in their careers.  Somehow we need to make them understand that.

If Statement Programming Projects

Over the years I have used a number of projects to give students practice using if statements – especially those that involved nesting or checking lots of values. Currently I am using:

• Hurricanes – user enters a wind speed and the program reports the storm category
• Voting – User enters an age, and checks boxes to indicate citizenship and registration
• Pizza pricing – Base pizza prices plus add-ons for veggies, meats, or different cheeses.
• Movie theatre pricing – a bit easy as there is only ages to check but ranges require some thought.
• Ski tickets – prizes based on age and whether or not they are staying at the resort. I could add holiday/weekend of midweek as well.
• Jumanji – If the random number generator “rolls” two dice whose totals are a 5 or and 8 let the player out of the jungle.

These all work fairly well. Students relate to most of those. Voting gets kids thinking about their future so that is a plus. Obviously decision structures show up in other projects all semester long but these have that as a special focus.

I’m trying to think of some new ones. Projects that are relatable and that are complicated enough to make students think but not so hard that they get frustrated easily. What are you using? What works well with your students?

Book Review: "Tools and Weapons"

"Tools and Weapons" by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne is a look at some important computing issues through a Microsoft lens. It is a pretty revealing look as the authors write seriously about the thinking behind Microsoft’s dealing with issues like the Snowden leaks, suits against the government about over reaching subpoenas, protection of users data, transparency, cyber security, and more.

I really like this line from the introduction "When your technology changes the world, you have a responsibility to help address the world you helped create."

There were several threads moving through the book. One was the need for building guiding principles for looking at technology and its uses. An other was the need for diversity among people developing technology and the guiding principles. There is frank talk about embedded bias in algorithms and how diversity is essential to fixing that problem. Responsibility for what technology does is another key thread. Without using these words, the book suggests that “should we” is as important if not more so than “can we.”

The chapters on Artificial Intelligence and facial recognition are the best look at the pros and cons I have read so far. Many people seem to have a doomsday view of AI but Smith and Browne have a more nuanced look; one that is not apocalyptic but more practical and near term. There is a lot to think about in these chapters but the picture painted is more about how we need to think about issues going forward than that we should either panic or be unconcerned.

I found the chapter on China very interesting. It was clearly written carefully to outline cultural and political differences without appearing to attack anyone. I might have preferred a stronger stance but I’m not the president of a global company.

One clear takeaway for me is that today’s Microsoft is not the same Microsoft as it was under Ballmer or Gates. Satya Nadella is a different sort of leader altogether and ethics and principles of a company are set at the top. Where Gates was naïve in some ways and Ballmer was focused on the bottom line Nadella, while not losing sight of the bottom line and still naïve in some ways (remember his gaffs about women getting ahead) looks at things differently, listens better, and is interested in the better good.

His decision to release Windows XP patches for the WannaCry virus for free is one I have to wonder if Ballmer would have made the same way. Maybe he would have but that I have to wonder is telling.

The book is not a difficult read. The language is non technical and technology is explained in layman’s terms. That is not to say that the book is only for non-technical people. I think technical people should read it. So should policy makers in both government and the private sector. It would make a great supplemental reading for an ethics course, especially for an ethics course for technical people.

One last interesting thought from the book. No one graduates from a US military academy without taking an ethics course but many people graduate with technical degrees without taking an ethics course. Maybe that should change.

Password Checking Tools

Neil Plotnick shared some Password Checking Tools on Facebook recently. I’ve used some of these in the past and find them useful and instructive.

• https://howsecureismypassword.net/
  Allows the user to quickly determine the speed in which a computer can crack a given password.
• https://password.kaspersky.com/
  Similar with some good suggestions to make them more secure.
• http://www.passwordmeter.com/
  Detailed indication of what makes a password more secure.

The more security aware of my students always ask me how safe it is to use these websites. I tell them to use things they think are good passwords but not ones they actually use. Some of the sites make the same recommendation.

The first two sites above give an estimate for how long it would take a computer to brute force crack the password. The estimates don’t always agree. This is not surprising as they are probably based on some slightly different assumptions. The time scale is more important than the actual number though.

The third site explains why a password it strong or weak which is very useful. One thing that is interesting is the impact of special characters. I have run into a number of sites that don’t allow special characters in passwords. I find that surprising and wonder why that is. I’d rather require their inclusion.

Having students in a programming class write their own password checker is a great exercise by the way. It helps reinforce string manipulation, general parsing concepts, and password safety all at the same time.

NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing

This is a great program for high school girls interested in technology. I have had several students get awards at the state level and they all say it has been a good thing for them.

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Hello Educators! Applications for the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing are now open! The deadline is November 5th, 2019. As an educator, you play a pivotal role in supporting the next generation of technologists. When 2018 AiC Award recipients were surveyed about their motivation to apply for the award, 65% of respondents named outside encouragement to apply. When asked about who most influenced the award recipient to apply, 62% of respondents named Teachers/Educators. Encourage your students to apply and spread the word!

When you endorse a student’s application, you are eligible and encouraged to apply for the NCWIT Educator Award. Applications are due December 2nd, 2019!

https://www.aspirations.org/participate/high-school