Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
More Than One Way To Code a Solution (to a programming project)
Garth Flint has an interesting post about grading programming projects (It is never easy) in which he talks about the interesting solutions students come up with...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson