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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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)...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson