Let me Google that for you

Piloting a new course this semester - Intro to Computer Science part 2. Between the existing Intro part 1 and this, we should be able to do a pretty thorough job in preparing our kids for the future.

We decided that we wanted the kids to make deliverables in the form of web pages - plain old html written by hand. Part of the idea was to demystify things, part was to let the kids show off their work, part was to have something that they can generate programatically as the course progressed, and part was to give them a tool they might find valuable beyond their computer science classes.

We also wanted to help teach the kids how to find information and how to learn things on their own. Despite the fact that our students use computers all the time, they possess a widely varying skill set. With that in mind,  here's what we tried to do:

After a brief introduction to what a web page is (just a text file with markup) and showing them the bare
minimum of markup:




I recommended a simple editor - gedit - while resisting all my inner urges for all things emacs, and then showed them an image of a web page:

The end goal was to make a page that had all of the elements in the above image but I also asked:

• How did they go about finding out how to make the page?
• Where did they search?
• what turned up bad results (and what were they)?
• what turned up good results (and what were they)?

I was very pleased with the results. Just about all the kids are now able to make a web page with the components in the image above. More importantly, this is what came out of our discussion:

• Everyone used Google exclusively as a search engine.
• The range of queries ranged from things like "html tutorial," "making a web page," and just plain "html" to maybe not so good things like "gedit web page."
• No one used social search or used facebook.
• They mostly all found sites such as w3schools. 

I'm hoping this is a good first step in having the students find things on their own and not be afraid to try things. I think it's an encouraging start.

My Favorite Student

Fred Wilson and me at #SOTC2012

Last week I was given the honor of attending the State of the City address. The mayor was announcing a new school for the fall. An Academy for Software Engineering. This has been in the works for a while and has a long way to go but the announcement was a major step. The project really got its start a couple of years ago. I'd been working hard for years prior trying to get the city to help me grow the program I developed at Stuyvesant, but until Fred got involved, there was no movement. Fred has to receive much of the credit for any good that we do as a result of this and I'd like to publicly thank him. If you don't follow Fred, you can read his post on the school here.

It was pretty neat to be on stage for the announcement, but those of you who know me know that I'm not a self promoter and these types of events aren't "me."

 What I found really special, were the emails and tweets I got from my former students over the next day or so. As a teacher, we'd like to think we are in some way a "force for good" in our student's lives and we rarely get to really see what impact we do or don't have. To hear from so many and such gracious comments brought tears to my eyes. Thanks guys.

I've been thinking a lot about my career as a teacher recently. I decided to leave industry over twenty years ago. As teachers, particularly teachers with technical backgrounds we leave a financially lucrative field to enter one with very few financial rewards. It's also a field very much under attack, particularly in recent years. The current line of thought seems to be that teachers are to blame for everything bad in education and government and private interests, everything good. As a senior teacher, I'm particularly worthless, at least according to what I've heard on the radio over the past year.

So, what do I get out of the deal?

Well, when I hear form my graduates, I know that I've made a difference. 

Also, the friendships I've developed over the years.

Stuy '84, '95, 2013, 2015 and families

A few weeks ago, we were catching up with a few of the Stuy '95 crew. We do it far too infrequently. They were students, they're now friends. I've had the privilege of seeing many young people grow to adulthood, get married, have children and in a small way I've been able to share in their lives. This is the upside of my career choice.

Maybe this is a result of being a computer science teacher who tries to keep a foot in the tech world. Maybe something else.

From the college student who stops by just to say hello to the graduate living across the country who drops a line to say how they're doing. That's the upside of the teaching profession.

Recently I thought it would be a good idea to organize the Stuy CS family. Collect email addresse and get a network going. I posted on facebook and sent out a few emails two days ago. So far, 240+ signups.

A while ago someone asked me who was my favorite student?

They're the ones that I'm still in touch with many years after they graduate.

Where's Waldo - Text style

Ok, it's a word search.

We're always looking for interesting applications to build lessons around. Over the years, I've tried different things when teaching 2 dimensional arrays. Simple game boards, representing a crossword puzzle, tables of various sorts, etc.

This year, JonAlf, one of my amazingly talented colleagues, decided to go with building a word search. I decided to steal the idea. It's a great one.

I thought I'd use this post to go through the project and why I like it.

Ultimately, the students end up with a program that will generate an n by m word search filled with random words from a dictionary. We gave the kids a skeleton of the base class. The only actual code we had to supply was the method that loaded a dictionary file into memory. You can check out the assignment here and the finished code here (we updated the repository as the project developed).


The first part of the project are pretty mundane. The kids write a couple of constructors and toString. Basically just practice traversing a 2D array. The project starts to get interesting at part 2, when they write the methods that add words into the grid. First horizontally:



After they write the method to add words vertically, we can start to refine things. We notice that the routines are essentially the same. The only difference between adding a word horizontally and vertically is  what we add  to the row and column each time. For one, there is a delta column of + 1, for the other it's a delta row. Further, they realize that adding diagonal words just needs both deltas. This leads us to factoring out the common aspects of the code and writing something like:



All of a sudden, they've written one piece of code that can add words in 8 orientations.

After filling the rest of the grid with random letters, we turn our attention to building a random puzzle.

This part of the project involves using an ArrayList of words. Our students frequently mix up array and ArrayList notation early on so by having a project that uses both but in clearly delineated areas, the students can be more comfortable with each.

For this piece, the code is again straight forward. Students run a loop that gets a random word from our dictionary and tries to place it in our grid at a random location choosing one of our possible orientations randomly. We get to see another nice little refinement again when we move from the typical first take at building a random puzzle which uses a three (or more) way if statement to select how to add words:



to using our more general addWords method described above:




When we're all done, we had some time to project the word search on the board and fun was had by all.

Peter, another one of our CS teachers had a great suggestion that I think I'll try. Start a competition to have the students modify the program so that it generates as densely packed  a wordsearch  as possible (giving higher scores first for longer words, then number of words).

Between the way the project broke down, the topics covered and the little refinements, I really enjoyed working with my classes on this project -- I'm hoping they enjoyed it as well.

Reboot

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the K-12 workshop at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference. It was great to reconnect with some old friends, make some new ones, and talk shop for the weekend.

One result was that I promised to start blogging again.

I've got a number of ideas for posts lined up. Some on pedagogy, some technical, and some cultural. Hope you enjoy them.

Earlier today Ben Chun tweeted about this post: http://worrydream.com/SomeThoughtsOnTeaching/.  To summarize -- teachers should practice what they preach. In the post, Bret Victor wonders if there are calculus teachers who spend their evenings doing calculus.

I know a number of math teachers who spend a considerable amount of their free time working on problems and refining their math skills, I also know many who don't.

I know wonderful, inspirational teachers in both camps. I've also known weak teachers that fall into both categories. Great teachers in both categories also spend large amounts of time working on how to best deliver instruction.

Before I started developing the computer science program at Stuyvesant, there were one or two sections of A.P. Computer Science. They were taught by a terrific teacher -- one of my mentors and role models, but he was a math guy and not passionate about CS. When I took over, the enrollment immediately shot up. Not because I was any great shakes, and Dave, the previous teacher was legendary. Rather, the students knew I loved CS. Part of that love was that I enjoy solving problems with computers, coding and what have you. The students can tell.

The fact that I code is a byproduct of my passion and part of the whole package that defines me as a teacher and a person. Whatever success I achieve is a result of this package. It's something I enjoy, and it also keeps me current with the field.

I've seen "naturals" who are just great teachers and get by without a passion for their subjects. More often than not, there's a ceiling in terms of what they can give their students either in terms of content, or more importantly, in terms of inspiration. Some times the ceiling is high enough that there isn't a problem.

Over the years, my "practice" has taken different shapes. Early on, while my students were working on USACO problems. I figured I had better be able to represent, so I started doing them. Later on, I would write systems to support my teaching.

More recently, I've been lucky enough to be surrounded by a number of like minded educators. We frequently share little projects we work on.

This semester, I've been taking the Stanford on line AI and ML classes -- both have been lots of fun.

This is just what I do and who I am and it is reflected in how I teach.

Of course, time and job constraints make coding difficult during the school year. With ~150 students, lesson planning, grading, and ancillary responsibilities take their tolls.

So, I guess I'm an example of what Bret Victor was talking about. I'm not sure I fully agree with his thesis, but it seems to work for me.