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dateMore Than a Year Ago
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Money is Hard in Programming
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Money is Hard in Programming

Last week I wrote about the making change for a dollar project. It got me thinking about how hard dealing with money in programming really is. The problem with...

How Many Ways to Make a Dollar
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

How Many Ways to Make a Dollar

I ran into a reminder of an interesting programming problem the other day. One I meant to use with students but never did. Other teachers I know do use it. Simply...

Define Learn To Code
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Define Learn To Code

I saw an interesting question today on Twitter: Hey coding enthusiasts! In your opinion, what's the best laptop for students to learn how to code on? #edchat #edtechchat...

Phun With Phone Numbers
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Phun With Phone Numbers

Among the programming projects I ran into recently was one to calculate all of the combinations of letters one could make from a phone number. Companies do this...

An AI Tutor for CS Education
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

An AI Tutor for CS Education

Recently I came across a Microsoft Research project called AI for Programming Education. The project “goal is to build a personalized and autonomous intelligent...

Book Review–System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Book Review–System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot is what you get when a top philosopher, a top political scientist, and a top computer scientist get...

Debugging–Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Debugging–Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast

Mike Zamansky had an interesting post called  What They Used To Know that got me thinking about the old days. Now Mike is a youngster and didn’t really start in...

Some Simple Early Programming Projects
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Some Simple Early Programming Projects

If you are not on Twitter you may be missing a lot of good things. For example, the other day Kelly Lougheed (@kellylougheed ) tweeted out a bunch of simple labs...

Are You Assigning Projects or Recipes?
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Are You Assigning Projects or Recipes?

Chris Lehmann, the amazing principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia,  says “If you assign a project and get back 30 of the same thing, that’s not...

IntelliCode Completion In Visual Studio (Preview) 2022
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

IntelliCode Completion In Visual Studio (Preview) 2022

There is a preview out for Visual Studio 2022 available and since I a) love to try new things and b) am not limited to by what is on the student computers I have...

Hexapawn–An Interesting Programming Project
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Hexapawn–An Interesting Programming Project

I'm cleaning up and finding interesting things. Well, actually, interesting books. One find is called "A Collection of Programming Problems and Techniques." Copyright...

Playing With Code–Recursion
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Playing With Code–Recursion

Recursion was never a big part of my toolbox but I am starting to appreciate it more recently. Regular readers know that I have been writing about and writing code...

IoT, Python, and Raspberry Pi–Oh My
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

IoT, Python, and Raspberry Pi–Oh My

Trying learn too many things can be a risky proposition. But sometimes it feels like the way to go. Regular readers of this blog know that I have been trying to...

Playing with Bacon's Cipher
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Playing with Bacon's Cipher

Bacon's cipher is a fairly well-known and simple cipher. Its considered a form of steganography. Unlike most steganography, the code is hidden in the text and not...

Pluses and Minuses of the Unary increment Operator
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Pluses and Minuses of the Unary increment Operator

There has been a conversation on Twitter about the unary increment operator (++) and related (+=, –, etc.). I tend to gloss over these when teaching beginners....

Observations on #CSTA2021 Virtual Conference
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Observations on #CSTA2021 Virtual Conference

The CSTA 2021 Virtual Conference is in the books. I really did enjoy it and I learned a lot. Virtual conferences are different from in-person conferences and INotes...

Notes on Day Three of #CSTA2021
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Notes on Day Three of #CSTA2021

No morning help desk duty for me today so I watches the whole “Morning Java” session. For those of you not at CSTA, Moring Java was an introduction to the day with...

Notes on Day Two of #CSTA2021
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Notes on Day Two of #CSTA2021

Today started, for me, with help desk duty. While I was there no one needed any help which I suppose says good thi8ngs about the HopIn platform CSTA is using. The...

Day One–#CSTA2021
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Day One–#CSTA2021

Today was the first day of the Computer Science Teachers Association conference. All online of course. It was a pretty cool day. I got myself set up with a twohttps...

Learning My nth Programming Language
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Learning My nth Programming Language

They say that the second programming language is the hardest to learn. That’s mostly because one learns how to program using their first language but each language...
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