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What is in a name?
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

What is in a name?

It’s been said that the three hardest things in programming are naming things and off by one errors. For some reason, this semester, my students are having the...

Teach Programming or Teach a Programming Language
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Teach Programming or Teach a Programming Language

For me, teaching is all about the concepts. Programming languages change. My first programming language was FORTRAN. This was the big language with I was in university...

Debugging Student Code for Fun and Learning
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Debugging Student Code for Fun and Learning

Students are really good at creating strange hard to solve bugs in their code. I am convinced that the code of a raw beginner can easily be harder to debug than...

Interesting Links for Computer Science Educators 19 March 2019
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Interesting Links for Computer Science Educators 19 March 2019

I haven’t done one of these for a while. I still Tweet or retweet a lot at @AlfredTwo but I needed a break. I’m not sure I will do this every week but I think I...

Awards I Wish We Didn’t Need
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Awards I Wish We Didn’t Need

Last week my school was told we had earned the College Board’s Female Diversity award for both Advanced Placement Computer Science A and Advanced Placement Computer...

High School CS Education: Where Do We Start and Where Do We Go?
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

High School CS Education: Where Do We Start and Where Do We Go?

There are a number of sets of standards with most based on the CSTA standards (https://www.csteachers.org/general/custom.asp?page=standards) and the K-12 CS Framework...

Don’t Cross The Data Types
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Don’t Cross The Data Types

Remember in the first Ghostbusters movie where the ghostbusters are told not to cross the stream of their ghost busting guns? And then at the end they do crossa...

Making Projects More Interesting With More Data
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Making Projects More Interesting With More Data

My students are working on the palindrome project. You probably know it – enter a string and report if it is a palindrome or not. In my case, I have them create...

Remember The Ladies–And Act
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Remember The Ladies–And Act

In March of 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband who would be the second US president “I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way...

What Are You Reading?
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

What Are You Reading?

We all get asked this question – What are you reading? Often this is the context of an interview and the person asking is really asking “how are you keeping current...

CSTA Board Elections 2019
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

CSTA Board Elections 2019

Wow! Computer Science Teachers Association members should all have gotten an email about this year’s election for the CSTA Board. It is a remarkable slate of candidates...

Don’t Trust Algorithms You Can’t Read
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Don’t Trust Algorithms You Can’t Read

I admit that I am a sucker for “the best [what ever] in each state” lists. I want to see how many I have visited and what is “the best” in my state. Most of these...

Minecraft Curriculum for Teaching Computer Science
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Minecraft Curriculum for Teaching Computer Science

I'm not a Minecraft person. I've had the demos. I know that some kids really get into it but … Well, some teachers love it as much as the students. For them it’s...

US Department of Education Needs CS Experts as Reviewers
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

US Department of Education Needs CS Experts as Reviewers

I recieved this from Pat Yongpradit of Code.org and thought I should share it.The US Department of Education has announced the EIR grant competition for FY 2019...

Programming Has Sure Changed
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Programming Has Sure Changed

Last week, I was reading some old code. I wrote it in 1975. It was in FORTRAN IV and it was on punch cards. Really bad code. One character, meaningless variable...

Programming Projects and the Good Idea Fairy
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Programming Projects and the Good Idea Fairy

I think Garth Flint (blog at Garth's CS Education Blog) first introduced me to the idea of the good idea fairy. The good idea fairy strikes you with a great idea...

Supply and Demand in Computer Science Education
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Supply and Demand in Computer Science Education

We have a supply and demand problem in computer science education. Demand has never been higher and it is growing.  The need is real. Take a look at We need as....

What is a variable and why is it so hard to understand?
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

What is a variable and why is it so hard to understand?

Variables in computer science are complicated. No, really they are. I didn’t consciously  realize how complicated until I read “What is a variable?” on the blog...

Computer Science Standards and Frameworks
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Computer Science Standards and Frameworks

I’ve been thinking a lot about computer science standards and frameworks the last couple of days. It’s all Mark Guzdial’s fault because he posted Frameworks and...

Lecture As Performance Art
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Lecture As Performance Art

Mark Guzdial posted a link to an article about him (The social justice case for computing: transforming tools for some into a language for all  – you should read...
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