Eat well, sleep much

To all my hardworking students I wish two weeks of eating well, sleeping much, and enjoying the company of family and friends.

I look forward to seeing all of you next year.

Happy holidays!

The power of concentration

Lab 218 was buzzing with creative energy! Students worked hard on our “animation” programs: the bouncing ball and window-edge tracker.

To please Andres, I played no Sam Tsui today, and despite my best efforts, Coldplay kept sneaking into the mix! So Andres was pleased, and I was not.

But I was very pleased with everyone’s coding progress, and I look forward to seeing what the power of concentration will accomplish overnight.

XL for VXXX+

When I first met my students in September, I expected that no one would have a final mark below 80%—and I had two good reasons for my expectations:

1. My students are smart and hard-working.
2. While challenging, our course work is systematic and straightforward.

Alas, not every student has yet met my expectations. But with about 40 days left before the semester’s end, there’s certainly enough time for every student to improve significantly.
Of course, such improvement will require a plan; continuing as before is unlikely to yield different results.

Today, I encouraged students to form pods with their classmates—or with students in my other classes—and to formulate a Pod Action Plan for reaching VXXX+ in XL. With the help of their podmates; the online textbook; our class website, wiki, and discussion forum; telephonic and e-mail conversations with classmates; e-mail with me; and with a concentrated and sustained effort over the upcoming Christmas holidays, there’s every reason to believe that all of my students can meet my September expectations.

Follow the bouncing ball

As the skills of my students increase, they have an increasing appreciation of the work required to accomplish seemingly simple tasks. Today’s case in point: a demonstration of a simple character “bouncing”—and beeping—off window edges elicited an appreciative buzz!

Now my classes are charged with the responsibility of replicating the code which makes this “simple” task possible.

Not counting comments and blank lines, my program is only 34 lines long. I’m curious to know how many lines of code my students will need to follow the bouncing ball!

At long last!

At long last, we’ve had our second programming test, and most students did quite well.

Now, we’re looking forward to a few days of graphics and advanced programming techniques. These are always fun!

It’s a wrap!

Today, we wrapped up our three-day peer review of the programming unit.

Next week, we’ll have our second unit test and look at some advanced techniques. But for now, it’s a wrap!

Horses and water

It’s a funny thing about horses: you can lead them to water, but you can’t make them drink.

The same could be said about otherwise intelligent students: you can give them opportunities to succeed, but only those with the maturity to take advantage of those opportunities will be successful.

I’m grateful for the hard work and earnest approach that most of my students bring to the peer-review opportunity. They are real champions!

The power of peers

I’m always impressed by students’ ability to help one another master course material and by the ease with which they exchange roles: sometimes being the teacher and sometimes being the student.

Today, we began three days of intensive effort to get everyone caught up with the many skills and techniques we’ve covered in the programming unit.

Thanks to the power of peers, I’m confident that soon everyone will “be the four!”

The pace is increasing!

As we cover more and more topics in class, we’ve got the skills and knowledge to work more quickly and cover more ground. But as the pace increases, some students are starting to feel the strain. Of course, the pace is also increasing in other classes, so for some the strain is even greater.

This means that now’s the time for students to take stock of their individual situations and make responsible choices—about extra-curriculars, attendance at extra help, allocating time across subjects, and sleep!

Some students have the ill-defined strategy of catching up over the Christmas holidays. But if appropriate measures aren’t taken before classes end for the calendar year, students may find it hard to use vacation days productively.

I encourage all students who feel like they’re being left behind to have a serious chat with me. Together, we can prepare a plan for keeping up with the class— even as the pace increases!

Big face

My super students gave me big face today: I returned after a week’s absence to a glowing report from the Guest Teacher who was mightily impressed by their courtesy, friendliness, and hard work.

I was so happy to return to school today! Thanks to all of my students, and especially to the Student Hosts, for giving me big face!

It’s been a tough week

It’s been tough, being away from class for an entire week.

I look forward to my return on Monday: students have been working hard on the substring assignments, and I’ll be pleased to see what they’ve learnt!

There’s more than one tool for every job

As we develop our skills as programmers, we hope to improve the quality of our work. When I look at my earlier projects, I’m always surprised to realize that there were easier, simpler, or more refined solutions than the one I had thought perfect at the time!

One common mistake is to over-use a tool or technique. The old saying is that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail! I’ve seen the truth of that this week: Some students have turned nearly every assignment into one of selection, even when selection wasn’t required. Others, who have mastered the if statement, have used it wherever selection was required, even if [grin] case would have been an easier, simpler, and more refined choice. And still others have made their selection based upon highly detailed criteria, when more general criteria would have worked just as well and been much easier to code and understand.

Of course, my hard-working students have really only just begun their journey into programming, so it’s both understandable and to be expected that they’re still learning that there’s more than one tool for every job.

You don’t have to be a Lunatic

Some students are struggling with the current set of assignments, and that may be because they’ve forgotten that we’re trying to develop an ability to break down a problem into small, ordered steps. Our course isn’t about Turing (as great as it is!), but about “problem decomposition.”

Whenever students encounter a programming roadblock, I recommend as follows:

Write out, in English, the instructions you would give to the Lunatic (see Don’t drown the Lunatic!, 25 November 2010) to accomplish the task. Now, follow those instructions with paper and pencil.

Did you get the desired result? If not, your instructions are incomplete, vague, out of order—or all three. Rewrite the instructions and test them again with paper and pencil. Keep going until you get the desired results. Then, translate your English instructions into Turing.

You don’t have to be a Lunatic to be a programmer, but it helps to know one!

Boosting the signal-to-noise ratio

One of the small ways that I can help students when I’m away from class—and students can help one another—is by participating in our class wiki.

But lately, I’ve noticed that the signal-to-noise ratio in our discussion forum is dropping!

Our great friend Wikipedia tells us that “Signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a desired signal (such as music) to the level of background noise. The higher the ratio, the less obtrusive the background noise is. Signal-to-noise ratio is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange. For example, in online discussion forums and other online communities, off-topic posts and spam are regarded as ‘noise’ that interferes with the ‘signal’ of appropriate discussion.”

I greatly value the discussion forum, and judging from the nearly 100 discussions so far this year, I know that students do, too! In a forum posting this evening, I’ve reminded students of the importance of “postings etiquette,” and I know that with their cooperation we’ll be able to boost our signal-to-noise ratio!

In good hands, redux

I’m sorry to be away from class, but I’ve confidence that my excellent students—and the exemplary Student Hosts—will have matters well in hand.

It’s a wonderful compliment to them that I can be absent and not be concerned about students working hard, being helpful to and cooperative with one another, and being gracious to and respectful of the Guest Teacher.

I’m grateful for such wonderful students!

Studio 218—the mime version

What a great treat to be exposed to new music in different genres!

And what a disappointment to have nothing new to listen to on a Friday.

I do hope that Studio 218 will “reopen” soon!

Don’t drown the Lunatic!

The Lunatic visits my house for dinner, and reminding me that there’s no water on Luna, asks if it would be possible to take a bath chez moi. Of course I reply in the affirmative. But there’s a problem, says the Lunatic: I don’t know how to take a bath!

So begins my traditional introduction to programming. I ask students to imagine that the Lunatic visits them and makes the same request. Can they write clear, straightforward instructions which allows the Lunatic to take a bath and return to the dinner table without being drowned, scalded, poisoned, maimed, or found inappropriately attired out in the street?

The task is more difficult than it looks, and speaks to students (in)ability to break down a problem into small, ordered steps. And such a skill is one of the three I proposed, today, as necessary for success in programming. The others are reading with precision and visualizing the contents of memory.

In the final analysis, all three are necessary to prevent the Lunatic from drowning!

Reporting for duty, sir!

Today, the mid-term reports were issued to all students. These reports give students, teachers, and parents/guardians a good opportunity to pause and consider the progress that students are making in their four courses.

Sometimes the report is gratifying; sometimes the report is a warning that academic behaviours need to change. Whatever the report, students have the opportunity to continue to learn and develop their skills, and to work towards an even better report at semester’s end.

Students can best discharge their duty—to themselves and to their learning community—by becoming the best students they can be!

Following the leader

What a treat it is to find so many students racing ahead of the curriculum and discovering for themselves new programming concepts and features!

In the last few days, students have been exploring the use of procedures, arrays, fonts—and even the rudiments of animation. Not only that, they’ve been sharing their discoveries with their classmates and working together to develop even greater knowledge and skill.

It’s a real treat for all of us to follow the student leaders!

Death by a thousand cuts

It seems a modern affliction: students believe it’s sufficient to produce text, regardless of its quality and without regard to its provenance. But text that’s been typed without checking—and repeatedly rechecking—its meaning, coherence, lucidity, fluidity, spelling, and grammar, and text that’s misappropriated or reproduced holus-bolus, even if credited, shows disrespect to the reader and disdain for education.

Not every modern student suffers this affliction, but left untreated, this disease demeans a community of learners and diminishes its accomplishments. What an ignoble end: death by a thousand cuts—and pastes.

What do you really think?

Today, the third of my three classes completed a mid-term survey designed to help me continue working for student success. The survey asks students to think about what they like about our course (what should continue), what they don’t like about our course (what should stop), and what they’d like to see in the future (what should start).

I always appreciate the candour with which students complete the survey, and their responses help me make small—and sometimes big!—changes to the way our classes run.

It’s a privilege and a pleasure to teach my students, and I take as a compliment their willingness to frankly tell me what they really think.

One of the pleasures of teaching

Few things please me more than watching students assume responsibility for their own learning. And what a pleasure today was!

Students were assigned the double task of analyzing and desk checking a partner’s code. Immediately, the room was filled with the bustle of earnest analysis and considered recommendations. Strengths were lauded, weaknesses were carefully diagnosed, and newly revised programs were tested and further refined.

The responsible and capable students of my classes explored, discovered, and learnt. All in, it was a most pleasing sight!

Does paper grow on trees?

Students often express concern about the use of paper, but these same students often have wasteful consumer habits. To cite just one example: buying chewing gum wrapped in non-recyclable foil-and-plastic packaging.

There’s an environmental cost to all that we do. Just breathing produces greenhouse gases! And I’m glad that students think about (some) of these costs.

But as well as costs, students should also consider the benefits—and there are many benefits to compiling a physical portfolio of one’s work. It’s much easier to flip through paper documents, to compare multiple paper documents, and to annotate paper documents. And it takes no additional electricity to read these documents over and over again.

One day, the resolution, flexibility, and efficiency of electronic display devices may approach that of paper, but in the present, the benefit of paper documentation to students’ education outweighs the environmental cost of paper production.

Of course, paper does grow on trees, and we grow a lot of trees right here in Canada! In fact, the Canadian Encyclopedia tells us that “pulp and paper production in the mid- to late 1980s has been valued at some $14 billion annually and has accounted for about 3% of the Gross Domestic Product. Exports of around $11 billion have comprised about 9% of total Canadian exports. The industry is the largest of Canada’s manufacturing industries, with about 85 000 workers in mills and offices, some $2.8 billion paid in wages and salaries, and some $6 billion in value added by manufacture. Furthermore the industry makes a net contribution to Canada’s balance of payments of some $8 billion, larger than that of any other Canadian industry.” [retrieved 2010-11-16]

Young minds, towering trees, environmental responsibility—all of these grow in Canada!

Practising safe programming

As users of computer systems, we’re always making errors: mistyping usernames and passwords, selecting the wrong menu choice, clicking the wrong button, and so on.

Thankfully, modern programmers care enough to allow us to re-enter mistyped IDs, say that we didn’t really mean to log off (you know we mean you, Windows!), and undo those disastrous cuts-and-pastes.

Today in class, we saw how to check user input for reasonableness, allowing us to start protecting users from themselves. Our programming skills are growing up, and now we can show that we care enough to practise safe programming!

Lather, rinse, repeat!

Today we had the good fortune to have a visitor in our period C class: the VIVP responsible for Vic Park’s IT. He got to see our introduction to the third leg of the program-control tripod: repetition.

Now we’ve got the full set: sequence, selection, and repetition. This means we can really pick up our programming game and write some interesting programs—including those with animation!

Thanks for stopping by, Mr. Ward. You’re welcome to repeat your visit anytime!

Lest we forget

Today Vic Park students provided a moving Remembrance Day ceremony. I am grateful to these students and their teachers for the opportunity for thoughtful observance.

What does the picture show?

Today students had the chance to show me what they’ve learnt so far in the programming unit.

A test is stressful for teachers and students alike: teachers want to ensure that the material tested fairly represents the work studied and that tests are equivalent across classes; and students want to demonstrate their mastery of the material and have the opportunity to stand out from their peers.

In the end, though, a test is just one component of a student’s evaluation—just a single frame in the movie of a student’s life.

Should we accumulate our happiness?

A common task performed by computer programs is the production of financial statements for credit unions, banks, credit-card companies, and so on. These programs must accumulate transactions (deposits, withdrawals, purchases, payments) and frequently must count these transactions as well, in order to determine what fees, if any, must be paid by clients.

Today we looked at a simple example of an accumulator and a counter: the accumulation and counting of marks to enable the calculation of their arithmetic mean. This example, and those to follow, will lead nicely to a discussion of repetition—the final leg of our control-structures tripod.

Happiness is like manna; it is to be gathered in grains, and enjoyed every day. It will not keep; it cannot be accumulated; nor have we got to go out of ourselves or into remote places to gather it, since it has rained down from a Heaven, at our very door.—Tryon Edwards (1809–1894)

The 2 Ds of successful programming

It seems a bit paradoxical, but success at programming requires attention to both the macro and the micro levels.

We start our analysis of a problem with an overview (the macro level) and decompose the problem into smaller and smaller parts, eventually arriving at the micro level at which attention to detail is crucial—as our recent code-analysis exercise reveals.

So to be successful programmers, we need to be masters of the 2 Ds: Decomposition and Detail.

We’re well on our way!

I’m quite pleased with the progress of my students, and I hope that they realize how far they’ve come in such a short time.

Next week, they’ll write a short test so that they can see for themselves just how much they’ve learnt.

I’m honoured and privileged to be their guide on this learning journey!

What happens when we don’t check our work

Things blow up in the sky

In 1996, Europe’s newest unmanned satellite-launching rocket, the Ariane 5, was intentionally blown up just seconds after taking off on its maiden flight from Kourou, French Guiana. The European Space Agency estimated that total development of Ariane 5 cost more than 8 billion USD. On board Ariane 5 was a 500 million USD set of four scientific satellites created to study how the Earth’s magnetic field interacts with Solar Winds. According to a piece in the New York Times Magazine, the self-destruction was triggered by software trying to stuff “a 64-bit number into a 16-bit space. … This shutdown occurred 36.7 seconds after launch, when the guidance system’s own computer tried to convert one piece of data—the sideways velocity of the rocket—from a 64-bit format to a 16-bit format. The number was too big, and an overflow error resulted. When the guidance system shut down, it passed control to an identical, redundant unit, which was there to provide backup in case of just such a failure. But the second unit had failed in the identical manner a few milliseconds before. And why not? It was running the same software.”—Abridged from The top 10 IT disasters of all time, retrieved 2010-11-04.


Hybrids go haywire

Toyota recalled 160 000 of its Prius hybrid vehicles following reports of vehicle warning lights illuminating for no reason, and cars’ gasoline engines stalling unexpectedly. But unlike the large-scale auto recalls of years past, the root of the Prius issue wasn’t a hardware problem—it was a programming error in the smart car’s embedded code. The Prius had a software bug.—Abridged from History’s Worst Software Bugs, retrieved 2010-11-04.


People die

In the mid-1980s, a Canadian-designed radiation therapy device malfunctioned and delivered lethal radiation doses at several medical facilities. Based upon a previous design, the Therac-25 was an “improved” therapy system that could deliver two different kinds of radiation: either a low-power electron beam (beta particles) or X-rays. The Therac-25’s X-rays were generated by smashing high-power electrons into a metal target positioned between the electron gun and the patient. A second “improvement” was the replacement of the older Therac-20’s electromechanical safety interlocks with software control, a decision made because software was perceived to be more reliable. What engineers didn’t know was that both the 20 and the 25 were built upon an operating system that had been kludged together by a programmer with no formal training. Because of a subtle bug called a “race condition,” a quick-fingered typist could accidentally configure the Therac-25 so the electron beam would fire in high-power mode but with the metal X-ray target out of position. At least five patients died; others are seriously injured.—Abridged from History’s Worst Software Bugs, retrieved 2010-11-04.

Today, we took our kids to work!

Today, most of my students went to the workplace with their parents/guardians.

I look forward to reading their thoughts and feelings about their experiences!

Happy birthday, George Boole!

His method of formal logic—defining statements as true or false—has been used extensively in computer programming and hardware design since the late 1940s.

George Boole, the British creator of a mathematico-logical system that bears his name, was born in Lincoln, England. He began his career as a schoolteacher, writing articles on mathematics in his spare time. These investigations led to the book Mathematical Analysis of Logic. Queen‘s University at Cork, Ireland, recognized Boole‘s contributions and offered him the chair of mathematics in 1848. This opportunity allowed Boole to extend his studies and produce his most significant work: An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Dublin and Oxford Universities awarded Boole honorary degrees, the Royal Society of London elected him as a fellow, and he was elected as an honorary member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1858. Boole died of pneumonia on 8 December 1864, at the age of 50.

—Abridged from This Day in History (Computer History Museum) retrieved 2010-11-02.

A good excuse for being late?

Thanks are due the Student Hosts who helped our Guest Teacher on Friday. We all appreciate their efforts!

Today, students demonstrated to one another their best coding ideas and techniques. Working in small groups, they found the best features of their Turing programs and incorporated them into hybrid assignments which are the “best of breed!”

Wow! Could some of my students be future recipients of the Turing Award?

In good hands

I was away from class today, but I was confident that my classes would be gracious hosts to the Guest Teacher who took my place.

In the short time that my students have been my students, they’ve established a reputation as polite, respectful, and cooperative. And with great volunteer Student Hosts lending a hand, I know that the HTML clean-up scheduled for today’s class was productive and worthwhile.

I look forward to seeing everyone again on Monday!

SPTN

One of the greatest pleasures of teaching is the opportunity to meet the parents and guardians of my fabulous students at Student Parent Teacher Night.

I thank everyone who took the time to meet with me this evening. It’s a long evening—but so worthwhile!

Natural selection

Wow! Am I ever impressed by my students’ progress in the Selection unit! They’ve really understood the power that’s unleashed when programmers can specify alternative actions within their code.

We’re moving through the unit much more quickly than I’d thought possible. I guess that Mr. Darwin was right: my students are selecting naturally!

Sequence? Check! Selection …

teach_relational_operators

put "Questions, comments, concerns (y/n)? " ..
get student_response : *

if student_response = "n" or student_response = "N" then
   % go on to new material
   teach_selection
else
   % review old material
   teach_relational_operators
end if

The sounds of silence

Hello students, my old friends

I’ve come to talk with you again

Because a vision of Studio 218

From boring music we could wean

Was the vision that was planted in my brain

And still remains

Within a lab of silence

—with apologies to Simon & Garfunkel

There’s more than one way …

… to tackle a programming problem, and today we looked at an organic process that takes the problem statement as its core and works outwards.

Some of my classes have made outstanding progress in a short time (take a bow, Class C!), and I’m delighted by their newly acquired understanding and skill!

Already, they’ve been able to show me that there’s more than one way …

An intriguing date and a highly interrupted day

All of the interruptions were for a good cause, but among the Community Service Assembly, speeches by the impressive candidates for grade-9 representative to the Student Leadership Council, review of the Super-power Autobiography marks, and balloting for the grade-9 rep’s position, there was no time for Turing!

Luckily, tomorrow we’ll be able to pick up where we let off on Tuesday. Tomorrow’s 10-10-21 isn’t quite as intriguing as today’s 10-10-20, but we’ll make up for it with some intriguing new programming adventures!

A super-marker needs super-powers!

I always knew my students were great, but now that I’ve read all about their super-powers, I realize that my students are super-great!

Alas, their teacher has no super-powers, and so it’s taken a long (long!) time for their hard work to be marked. But now the results are in, and I’m looking forward to sharing them with my super-classes.

I may not be a super-marker, but I’m super-lucky to now know the stories of so many super-heroes and super-villains!

We’re in to input!

As much as we love Victoria Windsor, there’s a limit to the number of times we want to see her name. So it’s great that we’ve now learnt how to add variables, assignment statements, and keyboard input to our programs!

These small additions to our toolbox greatly expand the type and sophistication of the programs we can now write. Without a doubt, we’re now in to input!

Is it better to give or to get?

It’s all well and good to write programs which contain only constants, but running them is boring: the results are always the same!

Instead, we want to write programs with variables so that the program’s results will vary.

But variables are not enough: we need a way to get variable data into those variables—and that’s where get comes into play. With get, we can get information from the keyboard.

And with variable information from the keyboard, we can see that it’s much better to get than to give!

The case of the disappearing asterisks

Today we saw the importance of detail in every aspect of programming. What a simple task we had: display a single asterisk in each of the four corners of a run window. But it wasn't so simple, because some of the asterisks kept disappearing!

To be successful programmers, we need to think of all the details and try to trace, in our minds, the actions that we instruct the computer to take.

If we can, in our minds, think like the computer “thinks,” then we’ll be able to solve the case of the disappearing asterisks!

Stepping up! Stepping out!

I was delighted with the progress most of my students made with yesterday’s homework. Students are really stepping up to the responsibilities of high school: they understand that homework gives them opportunities to learn additional material and to consolidate the work done in class. They’re displaying a real maturity and will be successful learners!

We’ve also been stepping out with Turing fundamentals: we’ve almost got output under control—and soon we’ll be stepping in to input!

The ins and outs of output

We’re all pretty happy to be continuing our introduction to programming with Turing. It’s one of my favourite programming languages, and I can see that my students are catching on quickly!

Today we looked at some details of output—you can guess that input will follow shortly!—and the sophistication of students’ questions showed that they’re really on the ball!

I was delighted by the perceptive questions asked today in class—students are listening with critical ears and working hard to ensure their understanding. What teacher could ask for more?

Of course, so far we’ve looked just at some very basic features of the language—just the ABCs, really. But with these basic features we’ll soon be writing some pretty clever stuff!

I’m looking forward to seeing my students’ entry into output!

Celebration!

Today we had lovely parties to celebrate all of our hard work!

Well done, everyone!

Have a great long weekend!

Charting the accomplishments

Who can believe it? In only a month, we’ve mastered coding webpages by hand, validating and uploading websites, and the definition of dozens of important computer science terms!

Today we saw how to chart both the webpage development process and the program development process—and we wrote our first programs in Turing!

I don’t know about you, but I think we deserve a party to celebrate our great success!

I couldn't be prouder of, or more impressed by, the hard work and significant accomplishments of my students. And tomorrow, I’ll be delighted to celebrate their remarkable success at our first class parties.

These hard working folks are really on the charts, now!

The power of programming

Yesterday’s blog posting was fun to create. I had wanted to write something in binary code, but I hadn’t wanted the tedium of coding each character of the post by hand—so I wrote a program to do the work for me!

I wrote the program code in Turing, the great language that my students will soon learn. The program took each line of my text and converted it to a bitstring—then I posted those strings in my blog!

Today, I introduced students to the notion of decimal equivalents of bitstrings and provided them with an abbreviated ASCII chart. Using that chart, they decoded yesterday’s blog posting.

01010100011010000110000101110100001000000110100101110011001000000111010001101000011001010010000001110000011011110111011101100101011100100100000011011110110011000100000011100000111001001101111011001110111001001100001011011010110110101101001011011100110011100100001

0100 0001 0101 0011 0100 0011 0100 1001 0100 1001 0010 0000 0101 0010 0111 0101 0110 1100 0110 0101 0111 0011 0010 0001

0101 0100 0110 1111 0110 0100 0110 0001 0111 1001 0010 1100 0010 0000 0110 1101 0111 1001 0010 0000 0111 0011 0111 0100 0111 0101 0110 0100 0110 0101 0110 1110 0111 0100 0111 0011 0010 0000 0110 1100 0110 0101 0110 0001 0111 0010 0110 1110 0111 0100 0010 0000 0111 0011 0110 1111 0110 1101 0110 0101 0010 0000 0110 0010 0110 1001 0110 1110 0110 0001 0111 0010 0111 1001 0010 0000 0110 0001 0111 0010 0110 1001 0111 0100 0110 1000 0110 1101 0110 0101 0111 0100 0110 1001 0110 0011 0010 1110


0101 0100 0110 1000 0110 0101 0111 1001 0010 0000 0110 0011 0110 0001 0110 1110 0010 0000 0110 1110 0110 1111 0111 0111 0010 0000 0110 0011 0110 1111 0111 0101 0110 1110 0111 0100 0010 0000 0110 1001 0110 1110 0010 0000 0110 0010 0110 1001 0110 1110 0110 0001 0111 0010 0111 1001 0010 0001

If patience is a virtue …

… then my classes are certainly virtuous!

Today we almost completed the Basic Computer Glossary, and I’m grateful to my patient students. With good humour, they’ve been marching with me through the terms that comprise the strong foundation we need for the exciting programming unit which awaits us!

While we’ve been marching through the terms, my enterprising students have been polishing their HTML and CSS coding skills. Standing with those polished skills on the strong vocabulary foundation, my students will be super-ready for programming! (And as you know from reading their autobiographies, they’ve all got super-powers, too!)

Yikes! No Studio 218!

Yikes! We couldn’t have Studio 218 today because we’ve still got important board work to complete—but Studio 218 will return next week!

Today, we quickly reviewed some useful Notepad++ and HTML validator options, and made good progress with the Basic Computer Glossary.

And Class A elected Lisa as their class rep to the SLC. I’m certain that she will do a fine job representing her peers, and I know that we’re grateful that Naeem also stood for election. Thanks, again, to both!

No Studio 218 today, but Democracy-in-Action 218!

Secure foundations

Today we confirmed everyone’s understanding of Secure FTP and started building our Basic Computer Glossary.

I’m pretty excited about this because these glossary terms will give us the foundation for our exploration of computer programming. Pretty soon each of my students will be writing their own computer programs!

It looks like we’re building a secure foundation!

Welcome to our thinking, learning & doing centre!

Today I was so pleased to post our new Lab 218 signs proclaiming our thinking, learning & doing centre! I’m proud of my students and grateful for the opportunity to introduce them to computer studies.

For quite a few students, this course has been rather like a roller-coaster ride: it moves very fast and there have been quite a few ups and downs—and not a few fast turns!

But everyone has held on, worked hard, and discovered the pleasure of learning new ways of thinking about computers and the products we can create with them.

I’m happy to recognize my students’ participation, with the new signs. There’s no doubt that Lab 218 is a thinking, learning & doing centre!

We’re picking up speed!

Wow! Students have made great progress validating both their HTML and CSS code. All of their hard work for the last few weeks has really paid off!

Creating a new HTML structure, a definition list, was easy for my students because they’ve gained a good understanding of the mechanics of webpage design. I'm so proud of how much they’ve learnt in such a short time!

We’re picking up speed!

What we’re saying

It’s pretty exciting: we’ll soon be ready to begin our introduction to computer programming! But first, we need to be sure that we’ve got a common understanding of the many terms we’ll use to describe the great new concepts and ideas we’ll encounter.

Today, students worked with partners to brainstorm definitions of the glossary terms we’ve accumulated in class so far. Eventually, these “informal” definitions will be combined with “formal” definitions (drawn from a variety of authoritative Web sources) to create a Class Glossary that will be posted live on the Web. And to give us the tools we need for that live posting, we looked at three kinds of HTML lists: ordered, unordered, and definition.

Our classes went by quickly, as students worked to answer the musical question, Can you hear what I’m saying?

Look how far we’ve come!

We’ve worked hard for two weeks—and have we ever come far!

When we started school barely two weeks ago, my students wouldn’t have understood talk about hierarchical file structures, validated source code, and FTPing to remote webservers, but now they use these terms all the time to describe their activities designing and building personal websites!

Today, the push is on to complete the sites and peer marking so that all will be ready for me to start marking tomorrow.

I couldn’t be prouder of my students’ efforts and accomplishments!

Wow! Have we ever come far!

Countdown to success!

Everyone’s working quite hard to meet tomorrow’s deadline for the completion of the Super-power Autobiography assignment.

While some students are still finalizing the content for their site, others are polishing the format. This evening students will follow the peer-marking instructions and prepare their autobiographies with a link to the peer-marked form. And on Saturday I’ll begin the pleasant chore of marking both the assignments and the peer marking.

Lab 218 is abuzz with activity as we countdown to success!

Ready, set, go!

There’s been great progress in all of my classes, and I think that students now have the knowledge and skills they need to complete their assignments!

Just think: In only two short weeks, my students have learnt a tonne of new Computer Science vocabulary, concepts, and skills. They know how to code webpages and stylesheets by hand, validate their work, and use an FTP client to transfer their work to our webserver. On the first day of school, they wouldn’t even have been able to understand this paragraph!

I’m very proud of the progress made by each and every one of these great folk. Without a doubt, they are ready and set to go!

Canadians Connected 2010

While my afternoon classes enjoyed grade-9 field day, I attended Canadians Connected 2010: the Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority.

Keynote speakers Terry O'Reilly and Mitch Joel spoke about the importance of presenting Canadian culture and values in our web publications and on being “present and listening where people are” in the “real-time Web.”

A distinguished panel of Internet pioneers talked about the early days of the .ca domain (which now has more than 1.4 million registered names), important technical issues confronting the Internet (there's less than one year before the Internet runs out of addresses), and how Google believes the Web is becoming “mobile, social, and local.”

It was a great opportunity to attend this meeting, and I'm sure that the information and ideas discussed will help me do my part in educating young Canadians to be connected in 2010—and beyond!

Eat! Move! Sleep!

Students were surprised today when I told them that homework is not their top priority. Rather, if they want the best possible education—and life!—then they should ensure that they eat well, exercise regularly, and sleep well (probably at least nine hours each evening).

My students are great: polite, personable, cooperative, smart, and hard working. But if they want to make it through four years of a demanding IB-prep and IB Diploma program, then they must do more than just survive: they must thrive!

And the secret to thriving is no secret at all: it’s eating well, exercising regularly, sleeping well—and efficiently complete as much homework as is compatible with the requirement to eat, move, and sleep!

I always recommend that if the choice is between sleeping and homework, sleeping should win. Of course, most days there’s no need for such a choice: efficient students can organize their lives such that they can do their homework and eat, move, and sleep. But always, the latter must take precedence over the former!

This evening I’m doing my part to help my students lead a balanced life: I’m extending the deadline for the Super-power Autobiography assignment to Friday, 24 September 2010. This should allow students more than enough time to finish up and obtain a useful peer review.

Eat! Move! Sleep! (And do some homework). That’s the “secret” to the success of my great students!

Studio 218

Today we weren’t in our regular classroom, Lab 218. We were in Studio 218!

Starting today, every Friday is Music Day—and each class gets to choose the music played. There are only two restrictions: all legal! all good!

All legal! The music must be obtained legally. We’re not thieves, so we respect intellectual property.

All good! The music must not be offensive to any members of our community. We’re not sexist, racist, or homophobic, so we respect everyone.

Class C has already started getting ready to rock!

Monday through Thursday we’re in Lab 218. But on Fridays, we’re in Studio 218!

Great progress!

Wow! My students are making such great progress!

Today, nearly everyone had a validated index page, and those who didn't were only a few small steps away from success.

I hope that students appreciated the short lesson on Windows keyboard shortcuts. I know that they'd like to be more efficient users of computers—if only because they spend so much of their lives on-line! And who doesn’t like to sharpen her skills?

The experience of designing and creating pages is helping students understand a “painful” truth: no matter how hard we try, we can’t control in every detail how a page appears on a reader’s screen. In fact, we can provide only an approximation of our ideal page, because we’ll always be at the mercy of different operating systems, browsers, and display devices (CRT & LCD monitors, smartphones, iPods, and so on).

There’re some interesting applications which I think my students would enjoy adding to their web design tool boxes: Firefox,—especially with the LinkChecker 0.6.6 and NoScript 2.0.3 add-ons, and NoteTab Light, a seriously powerful text editor.

Whatever tools they use, I know my students will continue to make great progress!

A better day!

It was a pleasure to work with all of my classes, today. I missed meeting classes A & B yesterday!

Today, many students had validated index pages— and many more were able to resolve their problems by answering the nine trouble-shooting questions.

Tomorrow, I look forward to reviewing everyone’s printed copies of their index pages and stylesheets. Then we can move on to more interesting work—like completing the Super-power Autobiography.

Yesterday had been a bit discouraging, but today was a better day!

A difficult day

Unfortunately I had to miss my period A & B classes today for a funeral, but I was able to work with my period C class, and that cheered me up!

Students are getting closer to understanding how to create a simple web page and an external link. And 18½ period-C students now have a production directory!

This is encouraging!

I hope that tomorrow all of my students will be able to report that their index pages are live on the Web. To be successful, all they have to do is carefully follow the instructions found in the Website Design subsite and in their class notes. I know they can do it!

Today was difficult, but tomorrow will be great!

Kudos to my classes!

After a (well-fed) New Year’s celebration, I was very pleased to return to school to an excellent report from the Guest Teacher. My students made a very favourable impression and I’m quite proud of them! Kudos, folks!

Today we attempted to clear up some of the misunderstandings about creating and posting webpages. Students are still trying to understand the correct form for webpages, the necessity of separating the description of the content (with HTML) from the description of the format (with CSS), and the relationship between their mirror and production directories. (I think it might be clearer if I start referring to them as the development and production directories.)

Students made good progress with Filezilla, although they don’t all grok the role that the webserver plays in serving up webpages. That’s reasonable, though, because we haven’t yet had time to discuss the client-server paradigm.

I’m delighted to see how much my students have learnt in such a short time! They’re working hard and I know that they will be successful!

I think that my students are midway between discovering that there’s more to a website than meets the untutored eye, and having mastery of the basic skills of website design and construction. It’s an honour to be their guide as they work towards mastery!

ps: I will be absent from periods A and B tomorrow, because I’ll be attending a funeral. I hope to be back at school during the lunch period, so students are welcome to seek me out for extra help if they’d like. Otherwise, I’ll “see” them online via our class wiki.

Live: links to student websites!

The Student Work page has been updated with a link for everyone, so students can now confirm that the name they’ve given to their mirror directory matches the name which appears in the link to their production directory.

For example, Victoria Windsor would check that she’s called her mirror WindsorV, because that’s the name which appears in the Windsor, V link on the Student Work page.

When they’re ready to publish their websites, all that students have to do is upload their mirror directory using the FTP address, username, and password which they were given earlier. As long as their mirror directory contains an index page (a homepage) with the name “index.html,” visitors will be able to follow the link on the Student Work page to find their site!

I can’t wait to see my students’ great sites—live on the World Wide Web!

New Year 5751

As I celebrate the new year with family and friends, I know that my students will be working hard on their Super-power Autobiography assignment. I look forward to seeing their results posted live on our course’s student-work subsite!

L’shanah tovah! (For a good year!)

My students rock!

My ICS2O7 students rock! And wow—do they perform under pressure!

Today was intense: In just a little more than one hour, my hard-working and super-patient students dealt with network problems, swallowed three-days’s worth of lessons on HTML and CSS, kept their nerve during a sirens-blaring mad dash through the FTP process, and learnt about hosting tomorrow’s Guest Teacher.

I have the best CS students anywhere!

A special call-out is due the 12 students (4 from each class) who volunteered to serve as Student Hosts on Thursday and Friday. I know that they, and the rest of my classes, will do themselves and Vic Park proud! And thanks, also, to the Four Strong Men who wrestled the filing cabinet to the ground.

I've sent an e-mail message via our class wiki about student blog posts, the FTP address, and some other small matters.

Thanks, everyone, for being such great students today! You rock!

A great first day!

Today I met my ICS2O7 classes, and they were all super: polite, mature, friendly, and ready to rock CS!

Because I'm going to be away on Thursday and Friday for Rosh Hashanah, things were a bit hectic: we had only about 20 minutes for each class, and there was lots of information students had to absorb in order to be ready to do productive work in my absence. But I know that they'll rise to the challenge!

Much homework was assigned (on the first day?!?), but this means that students will be ready for real success the rest of the week.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the great websites they'll build.

What a great first day of school!

The adventure starts tomorrow!

I'm looking forward to meeting all of my new students tomorrow!

We've got a great semester of experimentation, collaboration, and accomplishment ahead of us, and I can hardly wait to begin!

Today I'm working on the resources my super students will need in order to learn how to design and code effective, accessible, and good-looking websites. I know that they'll do an amazing job!

Later in the semester, we'll explore

1. the workings of computers and computer networks
2. how to write our own computer programs
3. the increasingly important role of computers in modern society

Tomorrow: the adventure begins!