This summer’s reading was a balance of school-related and personal books. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport Cal Newport’s writing were recommended to me by a friend. After reading some of his blog posts, this seemed like a good book with which to start. It was a quick read and mostly reinforced my understanding of the importance of “deep work”. Last year, when we had block scheduling during, and I was isolated during these blocks, I found that I got a ton of stuff done. While it will be more challenging this school year, I’m hoping to continue to find t ..read more

For the past two years, our AP Computer Science A (APCSA) students have completed the Tetris Lab at the end of the Object Oriented Design (OOD) unit. The initial idea and structure for the lab was forked from Stanford Tetris Project from Stanford’s CS108 by Nick Parlante, which I found as it was a SIGCSE 2001 Nifty assignment. We made significant changes during the first implementation of the lab and before the second. The current version of the Tetris Lab is a great fit for the goals that we have for our students at the point in the semester when they complete it. Your students may need somet ..read more

I’m teaching a new class this year in which students complete a lot of activities. Each activity has an associated Google document that provides scaffolding. Students need to reference these activity documents throughout the unit as well as use them as a resource for summative performance evaluations at the end of the unit. My approach this semester is to create a Canvas assignment for each activity and use the GoogleDocs external tool as the submission mechanism. This helps students in that a copy of the Google document is automatically created when they view the assignment, and they just hav ..read more

Barring an unforeseen issue, we will enabling Linux on the chromebooks of students in AP Computer Science A and Software Engineering. APCSA students will use BlueJ and Software Engineering students will use VS Code. The rest of this post is an updated version of the original post which reflects that Chrome OS 81 and later installs Debian 10 (Buster), which resolves many of the issues previously identified. Given the uncertainty of the structure of high school this fall, I’ve been exploring various options my students in AP Computer Science A if they are learning outside of the classroom withou ..read more

One of the units during the fall semester in my Software Engineering class focuses on technology, society, and ethics. The big idea is that “Students will research, analyze, discuss, and present contemporary issues at the intersection of technology, society, and ethics”. The guiding question is “How does technology affect change from the critical context of privacy, social justice, economics, education, politics, culture, security, or warfare?”. The rationale for this unit is that technology is having a dramatic impact on every aspect of today’s society. The scope of the impact ranges from the ..read more

I haven’t published my summer reading list in a few years. This summer, for some reason, I seemed to have more time for reading. Most of my reading centered on potential new books for the Technology, Society, and Ethics book study unit in my Software Engineering class where students analyze these texts through a lens that combines the technological, societal, and ethical perspectives. Small groups of students explore the question “How does technology affect change from the critical context of privacy, social justice, economics, education, politics, culture, security, or warfare?”. I did read a ..read more

The audience for this post is a bit more specialized than usual. This post is for teachers who will be engaged in remote learning, use macOS, and have similar requirements for streaming and recording online lessons as I. Here are my requirements: online lessons are useful both synchronously and asynchronously, as not every student will be able to attend lessons in real-time online lessons are recorded with high quality and later uploaded to my YouTube channel online lessons are streamed via Google Meet and Zoom (not sure which we will use this fall) during online lessons my audio is only hear ..read more

This year, perhaps more than any in the past, it will be important for me to get to know my students as quickly as possible. At the start of each year, I administer a survey to facilitate this process. Many of the questions that I ask are from start-of-year surveys shared by John Burk and Brian Frank. Each summer, I revisit the survey to add some questions and remove others. This summer, I created an additional assignment in Canvas where students submit an audio recording of themselves saying their name. My hearing isn’t the best, and I hope that having a recording to play over and over again ..read more

I’m fortunate to be a member of an excellent Professional Learning Community (PLC) focused on the computer science pathway at my school. We are given an hour each week to develop formative assessments, analyze data, reflect on our instructional practices, and improve our students’ experience in our classes. One of the essential standards for all our computer science courses is “Collaborating around Computing”. (Our essential standards are the CS Practices from the K12 Computer Science Framework.) In our PLC, we determined that some students needed additional support when supporting their class ..read more

I’ve been meaning to update my post from 2018 – Physical Representations of Variables, Objects, and References in APCSA with how it has evolved the past two years. The impetus to finally do so is due to attending Colleen Lewis and Hannah McDowell’s CSTA 2020 session, “AP CS A: Physical Models of Java Memory”. Colleen has a document with instructions, examples, videos, everything. What I realized during the session is that my approach was missing the concrete representation; it only had the pictorial and abstract representations. (I love the use of “remote controls” to model references!) S ..read more