Monthly Archives: May 2012

Comp Sci Job Demand

It seems like I run across an article like this at least once a week.  Most of the articles are strictly about the demand for Computer Science graduates, but the demand for Cybersecurity professionals is just as high.  I spoke with a former student last week that has a Masters in a Cybersecurity related field and his career is going quite well.

I also had the pleasure last week of having lunch with 3 of my former students all of which are now in the Turing Honors Computer Science program at the University of Texas at Austin.  These students are all freshmen and have all received numerous internship offers for the summer.  The internship offers were all from highly respected companies with nice compensation packages.  Almost all of their classmates had multiple summer interships offers as well and all of their friends that recently graduated had a large number of job offers from which to choose.   It sounds like the UT Austin Computer Science program has it going on!

A friend just sent this video link which follows along the same lines as the rest of my post.

Lastly, if you are still searching for a Computer Science workshop for the summer, check of my workshop list.   My workshops are a blast – we covers lots of material and have a ton of fun doing it.  Cheers!

Post AP Exam Humor

Well, another AP exam has come and gone.
The 2012 exam is now in the rear view mirror.

This year’s exam is proof that you will never get the Bugs out of your code no matter how hard you try.

Having tortured my students with over 600 practice M/C questions ( Moodle makes this sooooo easy ) and volumes of Free Response questions, I felt the need to blog a bit about the comments I heard after the exam ( more than 48 hours after the exam ).

It never fails that after spending hours working to help students prepare that there will be handful of comments that upon hearing make you laugh and cry at the same time.  I have embellished these just a bit to protect the innocent and to slightly increase the humor factor.

These comments are in decreasing order of humor or pain – however you quantify them.
Please do your best to infer the extreme level of sarcasm in my [anecdotal bracketed] mental responses.

DISCLAIMER – All comments were heard 48 hours after the exam.

#5 – “We had to write programs all year long with Bug[], Dog[], Cat[], Alien[], Aardvark[], Chicken[], and Alligator[] arrays, but never any Horse[] arrays.”
[ I clearly blew it on this one.  How could I have not know to make a Horse[] array lab?  Arrrgggh!  ]

#4 – “What do you guys mean that you should always put private on instance variables?”
[This is only to prevent other goofballs from destroying your data from afar – the danger is apparently much closer. ]

#3 – “You should never in your life override an act() method!”
[Yes, all classes have act methods that are sacred and free from that nasty process called overriding and the multitude of assignments we did where we overrode act were just figments of your imagination. ]

#2  –  “I made sure to return on all parts of the Free Response – even from the void methods!”
[ My motto is if all else fails and are you are unsure what to do – just return.  Works almost every time.  Duh!]

#1 –  “We had to go through matrices over and over again and even had to count up all of the 5s in one matrix lab, but we never had to count up all of the 255s.”
[Once again, I clearly blew it  – I was way off by a whopping 250!]

I hope you enjoy this humorous post and also hope you have a great summer!
Enjoy the AP Reading if you are going and look me up if you need a Great AP Summer Institute!

Cheers!

Cheap Computers

Once these computers come online and you can actually buy one, I am getting a Raspberry PI for 25 bucks.  It appears that there are 100,000 or so back orders in the queue ( that is British for line ) so we may all be waiting for a good while to get one.  The 35.00 model has a few more features like a network connection, but either one would be fun to have in a Comp Sci class.  My students all thought this was awesome and they all want to buy one and think that everyone else needs to buy one as well.  Happy Hunting!