This is Alfred Thompson's blog about computer science education and related topics.
The discussions about the future of computer science and of computer science education are unending. We are seeing huge numbers of layoffs in the tech industry as coders are (attempted to be) replaced by artificial intelligence. Universities and high schools are seeing drops in signups for computer science courses as students don’t see the same economic future in coding that they once did. Some…
CSTA 2026 was an excellent conference. No surprise there. CSTA is the biggest and best conference for K-12 computer science teachers. It’s one I recommend to anyone teaching CS. I am told that there were about 1,150 people in attendance. Not a record but a lot more than we had even a few years ago. Lots of younger teachers and a lot more diversity as well. These are all good things. There were…
Today's opening keynote was all about the new PK-12 Computer Science Education Standards. A lot of work went into these new standards. I really want to dig into them. I did download the PDF but I think it may be easier to use the website. The PDF is 218 dense pages. It sounds like most the curriculum vendors have been tracing the development of the standards so you can probably expect any…
There is a lot of talk about networking at conferences like this. While there is nothing wrong with networking if you do it right you are really making friends. Friendship pays all sorts of dividends. For example, I met Tommy Gober at some conference. It may have been CSTA, it may have been SIGCSE, but we’ve seen each other at conferences. Tony is not at CSTA this year but we are friends on…
It seems like robots are everywhere at CSTA in the exhibit hall. I made a pass through and looked at most of them. So who was showing robots? Ozobot is first. I love these little robots. They are adorable, come fully assembled and students also love them. Their new Ari robot has a bunch of new features including a display screen that is touch sensitive and some additional sensors. G-cube from…
CSTA 2026 didn’t start until noon today so I spent some time exploring. I wandered around the French Quarter. Bourbon street is not the same at 8AM as it is at 8PM for sure. But I found some good food and am snacking on a beignet as I write this up. I snuck into the exhibit hall before it opened to take pictures of some of the booths. They’ll probably wind up in a blog post after the conference.…
Less than two weeks until the annual Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Conference. As far as I am concerned this is the most important professional development conference for computer science educators in K-12. SIGCSE is great for university CS educators and it’s valuable for K-12 as well but the focus is really higher education. ISTE, going on now in Orlando, is huge and there are…
I think it is fair to say that I have had an eclectic career in computing. I’ve worked for some of the largest computer companies in the world and I have spent a good bit of time in the classroom teaching. For about a fourteen of those years I had what I would call pure software development roles. Though I have written code for every job I have had for some jobs that was the main purpose of my…
Recently I was going through my memory box and I came across this button. It was given out by the hundreds at a conference in the 1970s. . What is the spirit of 100110 you ask? That represents the number 38 which doesn’t seem to mean much. And it really doesn’t because that is not the number that was supposed to be there. Who ever was in charge of printing the buttons left off a zero where the…
The tl;dr is simply this “We don’t teach physics in high school in order to create more professional physicists.” I’ve said that for years and it is true. Teaching CS in high school should not be to create more professional computer scientists, programmers, software developers or professional anything. Just as we teach physics to help students to understand the world they live in, we should teach…
One of the things I have been doing since retiring is baking bread. I love some fresh bread and I want to avoid artificial ingredients in my food. That doesn’t mean I feel the need for a little artificial help in the process. Enter bread machines. Right now I have two machines I am using. The machine on the right does the whole thing. I put in the ingredients, set a few settings, press start and…
Trying something new to me. I’ve been really interested in AI recently and when my friend, Rich, approached me about sharing his thoughts about AI I jumped at the chance. Richard Crane and I chatted for a while about artificial intelligence. What follows is a transcript of that conversation. Introduction Alfred Thompson: Welcome, everyone. Today I’m joined by Richard Crane, Founder, CTO, and Chief…
My friend Pat Yongpradit has a post on LinkedIn that got me thinking. It starts with a key statement “Computer programming (coding) is not equal to software development.” Now I tend to think of those as similar if not identical but Pat points out that “Computer programmers and software developers are codified differently in the BLS data” BLS is the US Bureau of Labor Statistics BTW. Interesting.…
Artificial Intelligence has been big in the news the last few days. A lot of the talk has been about the Trump administration designating Anthropic a supply chain risk. The US Department of Defense (its official legal name) was unable to agree to contract terms with Anthropic. You can read Anthropic’s statement here. Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth There are apparently…
There are a lot of Changes happening at code dot org The Slashdot article linked there lists several of them. While the changes include a number of people changes including President Cameron Wilson stepping aside , Chief Academic Officer Pat Yongpradit leaving to join Microsoft , and some staff layoffs the change in direction, to AI, may be the most concerning. From Hour of Code to Hour of AI?…
I recently shared at quote on Facebook: Unless our students know that we care, they will not learn from us. I made the comment that I wondeedr if an AI teacher will get students to think it cares about them. I really believe that a connection between student and educator is important for a good educational experience. Several people on Facebook indicated that they think that an AI tutor will be…
Back before the personal computer age, computers had lights and toggle switches. One could use the switches to program computers and read answers in the lights. All in binary of course. We also used these tools for debugging. One could enter a memory address using the switches and see what was in the location, data or instruction, in the lights. If a computer program was hung in a loop one could…
I remember the first time I was observed by a principal. Brilliant man with two masters degrees and ABD PhD. He told me that he didn't understand much of what I was teaching but the students seemed to be getting it and the class ran smoothly. Not much in there to help me improve. I believe that teaching CS is different from teaching most subjects. But each subject probably has its own nuances.…
A friend of mine sent me a link to an opinion piece in the IEEE Spectrum - AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse –> Newer models are more prone to silent but deadly failure modes Are AI code generators getting worse? The tl;dr in this article is “Yes” because companies are letting poor programmers train the AI. You should read the article though. It’s not deliberate of course. It’s just the way…
BlueSky is the microblogging site for me these days. That is where I am getting ideas and information about teaching computer science among other things. I recently saw the following message. It’s an obvious possible coding project in my eyes. Read a word from a wordlist Remove the last letter and place in in the front of the word Determine if the new string matches an actual word. Display both…
The other day I ran into an interesting programming exercise on BlueSky. The project description is at 2D Dice Grid Scoring Algorithm - 101 Computing It’s a cool project. I decided to code up a solution myself. Now there is sample starter code at that link in Python. I do my fun programming in C# so I started from scratch. The first thing I had to do was to think about a Die class. I’ve written…
Mark Guzdial posted a link to an interview with Jens Mönig . Jens is the main person behind Snap! which developed out of Scratch (which Jens worked on). It’s a great interview and I recommend it. The story of Snap! is an interesting one. I think it is great that SAP is funding the team behind it. This blog post, which sort of rambles a bit (sorry) was inspired by that interview. There are…
Some of my readers who have been teaching Advanced Placement Computer Science (APCS) will remember the BigInt case study. It was a case study involving mathematics using large (very large) integers. As released by the College Board it supported adding, subtracting, and multiplying large integers. You will notice that division was not included. In fact, asking students to implement division was…
I’ve been writing some code for my own amusement the last few days. I have happily using Microsoft CoPilot to help me out. One really has to be careful with prompts though. CoPilot loves to make assumptions about what the developer desires. Often, it assumes correctly. Often enough, it assumes incorrectly. I spent a good bit of time trying to figure how where it was doing some things I didn’t want…
Seems like several years now I have joked or perhaps half joked that there are no Computer Science Education Week greeting cards. Have any of my readers seen any? It turns out that someone on Etsy offers some . I wasn’t impressed but at least someone else was thinking about it. Having students create cards might be a fun project. What would they look like? What sort of message might they have? The…