The 7 Lakes contest at 7 Lakes HS in Katy, Texas was great.
There were tons of teams and schools.
The written results can be viewed at :
http://www.apluscompsci.com/7Lakes_Fin_Results_Adv_Written.pdf
http://www.apluscompsci.com/7Lakes_Fin_Results_Nov_Written.pdf
Check out a sample written test at if you are interested in seeing one.
I have posted the 7 Lakes programming results and some pics on my A+ Computer Science facebook page.
The Computer Science contest season for Texas is underway.
Waller HS hosted the first contest of the 2012-2013 season on Saturday, September 29th.
There were lots of teams and the competition was fierce.
7 Lakes will host the next contest on the 13th of October.
There is still time to join the fun.
Email Paul Stroud at 7 Lakes HS – PaulMStroud@KATYISD.ORG
Check out all of the dates on my contest dates page.
Little Folks are Cranking Code in Estonia
This is a great article that discusses the decision in Estonia to start teaching Computer Science in first grade. I think Estonia has hit a home run.
I have been working with my sons’ elementary school classes for the last 3 years and have taught both classes how to write basic programs in Scratch. They can all use loops, ifs, variables, and lists to make games and class projects. It was cool to see many of them use Scratch to create their end of year projects last year. I am positive that many of the students in these classes will consider a career in Computer Science as they all feel very confident about the subject. Having working on numerous math concepts with my sons, I also feel these students now view mathematics in a totally different way after learning Computer Science concepts at an early age. Working with students when they are in the early grades is very important as it helps to reach them before they develop any bias towards a subject often perceived as difficult.
I really like using Jeroo in my AP CS A class to start the year. I have quite a few students that show up after having taken an intro class, but I also have quite a few that are brand new to CS. I use Scratch and Jeroo early in AP CS A to level the playing field. These environments are pretty light-weight and allow new students to pick up important vocabulary and concepts easily.
Save the Jeroos!
new Jeroo() for everyone!
Images provided by Joe “Subway” Finklestein.
I use Jeroo to teach many important concepts, including repetition, decision-making, Boolean logic, modularity, and recursion before moving into pure Java. This approach of teaching the core concepts before using pure Java really allows me to compress the front-end of the year. While in Jeroo, students master object instantiation, method-calls, and all of the basic Java syntax they will use all year long. All the while, students are having fun trying to make a fake Kangaroo avoid death, make friends, and occasionally fall in love.
I try to present interesting challenges and problems all year long, having students formulate solutions to each challenge. Students learn concepts as they need them based on the problems and challenges presented. This works really well and makes the learning more meaningful as there is clear purpose presented for learning certain things. I like to refer to this approach as problem-centered learning. The problem is always at the center and the concepts are added to the solution as needed.
A new version of Jeroo was just released so go check it out!
At the end of July, I had the opportunity to attend Camp Cocao Pro at Apple in Cupertino, California.
Day 1 at Camp Cocao!
Cranking code in XCode!
The camp was designed to demonstrate ways that college and high school faculty can teach IOS development.
We had a great time and got to see some really cool stuff.
One evening we took a ride over to Mountain View to eat and visit the Computer Museum.
We took a tour of the museum and saw old sorts of computers.
I wrote my first real program on an Apple II way back in the day.
The Apple II.
During the camp, we developed a few apps and heard talks from several Apple engineers.
On the last day, we visited the main Apple campus and the Apple store.
Infinite Loop Drive
My chauffeur
Finally, it was back to Texas and then to New York for an AP CS Principles meeting.
It has been a jam-packed 2 weeks to say the least.
Well,
All 3 of my AP SIs have concluded. I had a great time at all 3 stops and look forward to doing a few summer institutes again next year.
This year, I started each SI with Scratch and Jeroo on the first day and then moved on to GridWorld and lots of Java. I spent considerable time on arrays and ArrayLists as those topics constitute a huge part of the exam. We worked with arrays and lists using graphics, games, and cross-curricular focused projects.
Time was spent discussing ways to show students how important Computer Science skills all to other disciplines and to students considering a degree other than Computer Science. We read articles each day, like the ones I post here on this blog and discussed the relevance of talking about articles in class.
I just received a link to a great article about Stanford Computer Science and the changes they have made. It is a great article and makes me feel great about many of the changes I have made to my curriculum over the last 3 or 4 years.
Enjoy the rest of your summer!
As I am a big fan of Scratch, I had to post a link to Google’s new Blocky language. I have not spent much time with it yet, but it looks great. Any language that has a Maze solver example posted as a demo has to be cool!
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!
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!
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!