I’ve been spending a lot of time working with computer science students at Chief Sealth High School these days.  Creating lectures, activities and assignments for them has been a fascinating challenge since the students operate at a huge range of levels.  At the college level, there’s a fair spread, but never anything like this.  Some of these students struggle with reading, others are very limited in their math skills.  Overall, though, they’re an absolutely wonderful bunch.

We did a bit of work with Scratch recently to debunk some programming misconceptions and work on spatial reasoning and problem analysis.

I’ve created a number of structured Scratch assignment writeups including one for the little tree program pictured below.  Since I haven’t really found any such resources (links appreciated!), I figured I’d share: Scratch assignments

Scratch program draws a tree of user-specified size

“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 and ways to overcome them. One of my favorites was titled Rediscovering the Passion, Beauty, Joy and Awe: Making Computing Fun Again. Everyone has a different theory on why computer science is losing its appeal: programming is considered boring, programming is fun but students find the rest boring, it’s too hard, the field is too competitive, there’s a perception of a lack of jobs, it’s considered antisocial…

One of the talk’s speakers, executive director of the CSTA, noted that the enrollment crisis that’s been plaguing us for a few years may in fact prove to be positive because it is forcing us to come together and reengineer the field’s identity. Really, there’s an element of truth in all of the perceptions listed above.

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