I Love Teaching Math & CS

A few days ago, my AP CS Principles students completed a multi-screen app project in the Code.org App Lab environment. I was simply blown away by the creativity of their apps! This is the third year I've taught the Code.org curriculum, and this year I focused more on peer feedback and the iterative process. We began the lesson by introducing the project - creating an app whose design included at least 4 screens and whose code included event handlers allowing the user to interact with the app. The  rubric  also laid out the expectations that: 1) The intended purpose of the app is clear. 2) The app is visually appealing and the user interface is intuitive to use. On the day that the app was due, I asked students to trade their app with a peer, go through the rubric, and give each other constructive feedback based on the rubric. They shared with at least two peers, and then I asked them to modify their app based on the feedback they received. I explained that this version is con

Recently I witnessed how removing a small obstacle for one of my students led to a powerful transformation in how this student sees himself.  A few days ago I asked my AP CS Principles students to add themselves to my class on the College Board Digital Portfolio so they can submit their Explore and Create performance tasks as part of the AP requirements for the course. In order to do so, they need to log in with their College Board account and then click on the class code of their corresponding class period. When I shared with my students the link to the Digital Portfolio, the vast majority of my 97 students were able to add themselves within a couple minutes. Those who couldn't remember their College Board password had to reset their password and were able to add themselves by the next day. There were a handful of students who had never created a College Board account, so they had to create a new account before adding themselves to the Digital Portfolio. Out of 97 students, on

I was honored to participate in the Seven for Seven session – seven educators speaking for seven minutes each – during the 2018 International T 3TM conference. My flash talk was titled Giving Students Space to Stumble, in other words, allowing students to learn from their mistakes in a low-stakes environment.  I referenced Jessica Lahey who posits in her book The Gift of Failure: “Small failures, when the stakes are relatively low and the potential for emotional and cognitive growth is high, are... called ‘desirable difficulties.’ Learning that comes with challenge is stored more effectively and more durably in the brain than learning that comes easily.”   I argue in my talk that we want students to stumble in our class for that is how they best learn! I then share a few strategies I’ve used in my AP Computer Science-A course on how to give students an opportunity to learn from their mistakes and reinforce the message that learning is iterative. The video of my talk is below

Eddie (not his real name) was one of 33 students in one of my AP CS Principles classes last year. Eddie consistently did not to do assigned homework for my class. He was always pleasant and polite during class and clearly enjoyed the content of the course. However, by March, I had become very frustrated that he would not complete his work. His lack of follow-through was particularly frustrating in an AP course which requires that students independently complete two performance tasks as part of the College Board requirements. Last year we lost the first three weeks of school to Hurricane Harvey, and lost a couple more school days to snow and then to the Astros. So I was running dangerously low on patience as I felt pressure to finish covering the curriculum during AP crunch time. By March, Eddie was badly failing my class because of missing and incomplete assignments. Despite verbal promises to me that he would submit his practice performance programming task, he did not. I was ve

During his TED talk , Conrad Wolfram  describes computer programming as a means of recording procedures and processes and he offers that it is a great way to fully engage students and to check that they truly understand the concept being explored. He says that students gain intuition and experience in far greater quantities through programming and are able to tackle more challenging problems. Thus, they are “able to play with the math, interact with it, feel it. We want people who can feel the math instinctively. That's what computers allow us to do.” In other words, programming is an opportunity to do and understand mathematics! With this in mind, let's take a look at the following problem: How many different ways are there to climb a staircase with n steps (for example, 100 steps) if you are allowed to skip steps but not more than one at a time?    A programming approach to this problem was discussed by Maria Litvin during a panel discussion at the 2011 PyCon Con