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dateMore Than a Year Ago
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Scratching the Programming Itch
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Scratching the Programming Itch

Programming is fun for me. It always has been.I’ve always written code to scratch a personal itch. That is to say that I like to write programs that interest me...

Comments on Commenting Code
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Comments on Commenting Code

Comments sometimes seem to be a hot button for software developers. Opinions range from the manager I had who actually did want a comment on every line of code...

Early Registration Open for the CSTA Annual Conference
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Early Registration Open for the CSTA Annual Conference

Just registered for the 2021 CSTA Annual Conference Early discounted registration for CSTA+ members is now open https://web.cvent.com/event/354be991-0b98-48e0-b4d3...

Recursion–How and When to Teach
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Recursion–How and When to Teach

I’ll start with a confession. Recursion is one of those concepts that I struggled to understand in the beginning. Was it me or was it how it was taught? An open...

Looking Forward to 2021 in CS Education
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Looking Forward to 2021 in CS Education

What a strange year it has been. The pandemic and more took a lot of the steam out of what I had hoped to dig deeply into in 2020. Surviving is success in these...

Looking Back on Computer Science Education in 2020
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Looking Back on Computer Science Education in 2020

What a year it has been. I was reading my start of the year post from January. The closing was “2019 has some serious potential.” I had no idea what was to come...

Pythagorean Theorem Day Programming Project
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Pythagorean Theorem Day Programming Project

I’ve been doing little programming projects for my own amusement. I thought about doing Advent of Code like the cool kids are (Looking at you Mike Zamansky who...

Musings on the Goals of High School Computer Science Education
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Musings on the Goals of High School Computer Science Education

Recent conversations on Twitter and Facebook have had me thinking about the goals of teaching computer science in high school. There is no single goal and it probably...

Dreidel Game–A Chanukah Programming Project
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Dreidel Game–A Chanukah Programming Project

If you’re anything like me, you like to assign projects that have some relationship to what is going on in the world. Holidays are one such thing. December brings...

New Resources for Teaching and Learning about Artificial Intelligence
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

New Resources for Teaching and Learning about Artificial Intelligence

Earlier this week I was a guest speaker in a computer science class (via Zoom of course). It was fun to be back into a class and interacting with students. Thehttps...

Why Do I Care About This Program I am Coding?
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Why Do I Care About This Program I am Coding?

Why do we program? Well, for some of us it is because we get paid to write code. For some it is part of our learning experiences. For a few it is the fun of it....

Does It Matter How Fast the Code Is?
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Does It Matter How Fast the Code Is?

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with code lately. One of the things I have been experimenting with is cryptography (See Tiny Book of Simple Cryptography)...

The Making of a Computer Science Teacher
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

The Making of a Computer Science Teacher

There is quite the conversation going on in the private Computer Science Educators group on Facebook about teacher preparation for CS educators. This is a veryhighly...

Tiny Book of Simple Cryptography
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Tiny Book of Simple Cryptography

I've been playing with simple cryptography. Mostly stuff that was solid before computers. Just for fun mostly but some of it may make for interesting projects for...

TileCode–Creating games on and for handheld devices
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

TileCode–Creating games on and for handheld devices

People are Microsoft always seem to be working on interesting and unexpected (to me anyway) things.  My most recent discovery is TileCode. From the website:Microsoft...

What If We Asked Students To Write Textbooks?
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

What If We Asked Students To Write Textbooks?

A professor friend on Facebook posted that a student emailed him to say that they textbook the were using was “crap.” I suggested in jest that he asked the student...

Thinking About the Algorithms in Our Lives
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Thinking About the Algorithms in Our Lives

My wife and I use these fitness trackers, ours are made by Garmin, to keep track of our activity during the day. Each day the devices give us a goal for how many...

Artificial Intelligence, Humor, and Appreciation of Beauty
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Artificial Intelligence, Humor, and Appreciation of Beauty

Last night I started re-reading Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.  It’s an old book, written in the mid 1960s, so there are some old ideas about computers...

MicroBlocks For IoT and other Physical Computing
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

MicroBlocks For IoT and other Physical Computing

Well, there is a new tool in town for programming micro devices like the Micro:bit and the AdaFruit Circuit Playground Express and many more! It's called MicroBlocks...

What I miss and don’t miss about teaching
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

What I miss and don’t miss about teaching

Fall has come and while students are back in school I am not. I’ve been reflecting a bit about that. I don’t miss getting up at 6 AM and driving for close to an...
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