Elusive Information
I made a marginally provocative (and slightly childish) tweet and was asked to explain. Ok, world: I’ve decided that search engines, INCLUDING YOUR PRECIOUS GOOGLE, are basically useless. Please improve. Love, Hélène. I call it search malaise. Until maybe 2004 or so, I was super excited every time I searched for information and got tons [...]
AP Computer Science Advice
I’m heartbroken to see my seniors leaving but I’m also excited to follow their adventures. What a smart, talented and cool bunch of students! They leave next year’s AP Computer Science class with great advice.
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 [...]
Troubleshooting.
It’s somewhat ironic that computer scientists often get asked for computer help that they can’t provide. The truth is that software-writing ability generally doesn’t depend on utilitarian knowledge of Windows 2000, optical mice, wireless access points or printer drivers. A number of computer scientists in fact take offense when asked for general computing help. I [...]
Teaching the Internet
A couple of days ago, I taught my 9th graders about the Internet. My slides in PDF format are on the course website. I took a bit of a risk: this baffles me and I think explains a lot about the sad state of education, but kids don’t expect more than ten minutes of lecture [...]
Course planning.
I’ve been suffering from a form of writer’s block, I suppose. I’ll be teaching three computer science courses I’ve never taught before starting September 9th and I’ve found it incredibly difficult to figure out how to prepare myself for the challenge. It recently struck me that I’m going to be spending 5 hours of each day in class with students so my usual algorithm of 2-3 hours of prep time per hour of class time is just not going to cut it unless I make significant headway over the summer.
CS/IT 2009
What a week. My flight out of DC was delayed so I didn’t get into Seattle until late Sunday night. Monday was the start of my summer class on technology for incoming 9th graders. I gave the students a survey to see what they were interested in learning and the results convinced me to change [...]
TeraGrid ’09 High School Teacher Bridge Day
The TeraGrid is an NSF-funded grid computing endeavor in support of science and engineering research. This week, TeraGrid ’09 took place in Arlington, Virginia and the organizers added on a one day workshop for high school teachers. I was hoping to get some ideas on how to introduce parallel computing concepts early and maybe even [...]
Posting assignment solutions online
It’s a silly spat between an arrogant student and some SJSU instructor but it has caused a lot of noise I don’t really like. Here’s the guy’s blog explaining how he “won” against his professor who asked him to take data structures and algorithm problem solutions down (I’m sure he’s loving the blog traffic). I’m [...]
Teaching games with Pygame
I’m ambivalent about the place of games in programming/computer science courses. Some research claims it increases interest and retention, other claims it alienates non-gaming students. I personally would have avoided an introductory course centered on game programming and I worry that women are disproportionately turned off by games. That being said, I’m willing to concede [...]
