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A Few Thoughts on Scratch
Over the last year or so my older son, who is about to turn eight, has spent maybe one morning a month creating a video game using Scratch. This doesn’t seem like a lot of time to spend learning to program, but I’ve been trying to avoid pushing. Our usual mode of operation is that…
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Fastest FizzBuzz
The always-entertaining FizzBuzz problem came up again on Hacker News today, and for no other reason than I just got out from under a nasty deadline, I looked around on the net for interesting solutions, for which this Rosetta Code page is a gold mine. The Windows batch file and BSD make versions are hilarious,…
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Writing Solid Code
After 10 short years as a university-level CS instructor, I’ve finally figured out the course I was born to teach. It’s called “Writing Solid Code” and covers the following topics: Testing—There are lots of books on software testing but few that emphasize the thing I need students to learn, which is simply how to break…
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University Economics and the End of Large Classes
I’ve been stalled on a draft of this piece for some time, but Amy Bruckman’s recent post provided the catalyst I needed to finish it up. She hypothesizes that “the future of universities is excelling at everything a MOOC is not.” Clearly universities can excel at activities that require students to be near each other and…
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Economics of University Teaching
Today I wanted to ask a simple, specific question: How does my salary relate to the amount of teaching that I do? Let’s take a look: I’m paid $105,000 per year, so with benefits I probably cost $150,000. Sabbaticals increase my cost by about 13%. An in-state student will pay $6500 in tuition for 26 credit hours of…
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Book Review: The Shadow Scholar
Paying a professional to write an essay is probably one of the safest ways for a student to cheat, assuming the paid-for essay is not itself plagiarized. The premise of Shadow Scholar is that plenty of students are willing to pay for this kind of service and Tomar was happy to provide it—culminating in a…
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The PhD Grind, and Why Research Isn’t Like Sex
Phil Guo’s short online book, The PhD Grind, is the best description of the modern PhD experience in CS that I know of. People working on, or thinking about working on, a PhD in CS should read it. In this post I just want to comment on a few things. Phil vividly describes the sinking feeling that…
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Street Fighting Computer Science
One of my favorite recent books is Street Fighting Mathematics: a collection of techniques and heuristics for rapidly and roughly estimating the solutions to problems that may be very difficult to solve exactly. The book is important because estimation is incredibly useful for understanding the world and because our education system does not do a very…
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Recording a Class at Udacity
A good chunk of my time between the end of Spring semester and now was spent recording a class on software testing at Udacity. This piece isn’t a coherent essay but rather some random impressions and thoughts. The main questions are: What is an online course supposed to look like? How can we keep students…