#CSTA2020

I did some things at CSTA2020. If you attended any of my sessions: thank youuuuuuuu!! and hope it was worthwhile. If you couldn't make it, but are a CSTA+ member, you can watch the sessions when they're released online. What follows below are some additional resources and shoutouts. Session: Git & GitHub in 3 Lessons...

Translating An In-Class Activity to a Virtual Activity

I recently tried to translate an in-class worksheet-based activity to a virtual activity and I thought I'd share how that went. I'm currently participating in a CSAwesome Professional Development cohort and, as part of the PD, I worked with a few other teachers to teach a lesson to the other members of the cohort. I...

End-Of-Year Retrospective

I just finished my third year of teaching AP CS Principles. Each year I give a survey at the end of the year asking lots of questions about how things went. The results are best summarized by the amazing Justin Aion on twitter: https://twitter.com/MrATeachesMath/status/1133728533245779968 I've taken a once-over look at the results. Now I want...

Student-Centered Discussions in a CS Classroom

I've been iterating on a process to run student-centered discussions about code in my Computer Science classes. After a while I started recording them - you can listen to most of them here. I've gotten to the point where I like what's happening and want to write about it before I forget how I got...

A Year of CSTA Meetings

This past Tuesday was our last local Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) meeting for the school year. It's also the end of our first year having any CSTA meetings - these types of meetings & gatherings didn't exist until a colleague and I started organizing them back in August. All of this is pretty new,...

Classroom Posters & Thoughts on Belonging

A while ago, the Never The Less podcast released a series of beautiful Women in STEM posters. I already had a set of Code.org posters, but these ones were just beautiful and full of people I had rarely heard of before. I convinced my school to print several copies of them for me to hang...

Game Design Final Projects

Before the long blog post reflecting & dissecting how this all went, here are the final projects from my students if you wanted to play a few of them first. They're pretty cool. This is my second year teaching an introductory Computer Science class, mostly following the curricula provided by Code.org's CS Discoveries class. Last...

Shark Tank: An Explore PT Practice Task

For the third year in a row, I've done a Shark Tank project with my AP CS Principles classes as their Semester 1 final exam. After 3 years of messing around with it, it feels worthwhile enough to share out. The genesis for this project came from the AP CS Principles Explore Performance Task. When...

Concept Map Gallery Walk – Internet Version

My AP Computer Science Principles class is finishing up our first unit on how the Internet works. For the last few years I've usually ended this unit with a homework assignment that helps them prepare for a test. But this year I've been trying to assign less homework and instead find ways to work those...

Mistakes Gallery Walk

I've been exploring lots of ways to have students engage with code & syntax without actually writing code & syntax. One of the strategies I've been investigating is getting students to interact with mistakes, hopefully making them better debuggers and getting them to think critically about the grammar rules of syntax rather than the results....