Computer Science Guest Speakers
Guest speakers are good for convincing students that real, successful people are excited about computer science. It’s also nice as a way to break up the routine. Some of the speakers I’ve had this year: Stuart Reges from UW who talked about many interesting ideas related to computer science including meta, recursion and more! Mike [...]
While loops gone wild
I hope that my students know that I too feel programming is hard. In fact, I hope some of them realize that programming is exciting and meaningful to me in large part because it’s such a challenge. When students complain about difficulty, I like to remind them that they’re in school to stretch themselves but sadly that doesn’t tend [...]
Conditionals
Obviously, as I dive into high school teaching, I’ve been thinking a lot about mental models necessary for programming and about how to form these. With 120 students of my own that I have had the opportunity to see through their very first line of code, their first loops, their first conditionals, etc, it’s become [...]
Rediscovering the passion.
“Has anyone considered the possibility that it’s just not fun any more?” – Don Knuth, Stanford University, October 2006 SIGCSE caught me in an interesting place somewhere between extreme career-angst and profound passion for ongoing CS projects. Unsurprisingly, a number of the sessions I chose to attend had to do with computer science’s negative image [...]
