Github Pages for acbart
Let us say that you were developing a new course, and needed to decide on the grading scheme. Generally, we can divide your assignments into two categories: those that are proctored in-person (exams, classwork, etc.), and those that are not (homework, projects, etc.).
TL;DR: Computer Science Education should pay attention to the lesson learned in K-12 English Education about Balanced Literacy, and move cautiously while trying to integrate Large Language Models into the curriculum. Specifically, we should not throw out “programming” in favor of “prompting” the way that Balanced Literacy threw out “phonics” in favor of “whole language”. The fundamentals aren’t…
It’s been over a year since my last blog post, even though I have tons to write about. Amidst the global pandemic we are all grappling with big questions about our career, and I am no different. Still, with SIGCSE tomorrow, I wanted to write up a little bit about an exciting project that my student Kristina Holsapple is presenting.
This has been a challenging semester for my students. I am teaching CISC108, the introductory class for Computer Science majors. The class is tough enough, even for many students with prior programming experience. But, due to the Global Pandemic, this Fall 2020 semester is online. In addition to my existing curricular framework, I have a lot of new course policies meant to make the experience…
Last week, I posted on the SIGCSE-Members listserv asking for guidance on supporting black students in CS1. I have been meaning to ask for that guidance for a while, ever since I analyzed the data from my CS1 class last fall and was disappointed to find that I was not doing enough to support this subgroup. Given the current crisis facing America, and spurred by a related post on the listserv, I…
It’s been about half a year since I last posted, because it’s been a busy time creating new tools and curricula. Also in the past semester, I taught the “Introduction to Computer Science” course for CS majors (CISC108) for the third time. Recently, I was allowed to switch the course from Racket to Python. There’s a lot to go into about that change another time, but for this blog post I wanted to…
I just got back my Spring 2019 teaching evaluations, so I wanted to do a second self-evaluation on how the CISC320 Algorithms course went.
Before the end of last year, I posted a blog asking, “What do we know about CS1?” The goal was to list some things that I felt we had good evidence for, based on research I’d read over the years. It wasn’t a deep dive into the literature, just shooting from the hip on a subject I theoretically know a lot about. But when I posted about it on Twitter, I was surprised when Mark Guzdial recommended a…
I made a better follow-up to this post based on an awesome journal paper that came out around the same time!
I decided to clean up some analysis I did a while back about Python Abstract Syntax Trees. The thought was to download a mass of Python code and look at how Python programmers use various syntactic elements. I had thoughts about turning this into a paper, but I figured a blog post might be all I had the investment for. This represents a pretty shallow effort, in the end. But I merged all the code…