TEALS is in the classroom!

After a summer of hard work, TEALS is finally in the classroom as of this week. Along with the newly completed Issaquah High School (a cross between MS Research and a Galleria), 4 new MS teachers will be teaching in the brand new labs with our brand new(ish) curriculum we worked on over the summer.
For everyone but me, teacher orientation day itself was new and exciting. I totally forgot how many questions about school and teaching I had just logistics-wise. For me, I forgot how much I missed teaching, even though it was just summer break.

TEALS plows forward (and I have to assign homework to adults)

TEALS is now well into the lesson planning stages. Both the APCS and Web Design classes have a pretty good idea of what the school year will entail. It's funny, made it's a Microsoft thing, but I have to set milestones during the summer so we're all project planned out for "RTM (Release To Market)" when the school year starts. I have the teachers writing up their syllabussesseses and having them try out various projects they will be assigning during the school year.
In other news, I have finished a ThinkWeek paper on the topic, and currently getting it peer reviewed before submitting.

Hmm, almost a song for a for loop

If only Feist can add a little more to the song, it could be about a for loop doing a bit of i++...

The Bay Area doesn't care about Redmond

(Robbie Bach and J Allard pulled a Nicholas Cage / John Travolta from Face Off)

On a day that we saw Apple take over MS in market cap, the San Jose Mercury rubbed an extra handful of salt in an article on the MS Entertainment and Devices division shake up.

Microsoft is sometimes Redmond-centric, the Merc just plain too busy to check the MS press kits.

The Cube is back!

(Franken-cube, Apple G4 Cube with newer keyboard and Dell monitor)

I'm back in CA for one of my high school friend's wedding and it turns out one of my parents' Dell desktop from a couple of years ago gave up the ghost. Since I had a Apple G4 Cube around from before I went off to grad school, that's now their desktop. A 10 year computer running upgraded OS 10.4 Tiger is a little poky but doing its job web surfing, playing music and organizing pictures. The Cube is maxed out at 1.5GB RAM and has an upgraded HD, hate to imagine how much it would have been back then. I upgraded all of that later when it was much cheaper.

After all this time it still looks like it can be exhibited at MOMA and do cameos in Ab Fab, About a Boy and Royal Tenenbaums. Ahhh, the year 2000.

I'll let YouTube take us on a trip down memory lane...

What should be in a high school intro CS class?

I have always thought that intro CS should be taught alongside the other three big high school sciences, namely Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.

It does seem like there are more school that are looking into re-vamping their typing / how to use office apps class with something more solid. Some of these school have AP CS, some don't, some makes the typing / app class mandatory with a test out option. They are usually a semester long.

In the current school year, I have been fortunate to be able to teach two of these one semester classes and tried out various teaching strategies and projects (sans typing and app). I think for a semester long introductory class to computer science and technology should have these basic elements:

1. Application usage (Office + Photoshop).

2. How everything works including binary math, digital circuits and logic (building them with kits), computer components, software, and internet basics. Of course this would also include history of how these things came to be.

3. Programming concepts and game design using Scratch / StarLogo or similar intro syntax light visual programming language (any sort of LISP is a big no no).

4. Intro programming using Java introducing ideas of OOP.

I think these ideas can fit into a semester long class, I will try it out next year and see if that's a realistic aim and where on the depth vs breadth chart each of the topics can fall into.

TEALS set to go

TEALS (Technology Education And Literacy in Schools), TechEd has been taken a long long time ago by a worldwide MS conference.

After a couple of informationals at Microsoft attended by around 60 people, we ultimately received 10 applications for four positions to teach at Issaquah High School.

The Advanced Math class did not get enough enrollment to warrant a class, but both AP CS and Web Design had overwhelming responses from the students. So much so that I realized that we might have to go to a college lab assistant model. That's how we ended up with four open positions. Each subject will have a teacher and a lab assistant.

The resume review process was hard to select who we wanted to interview and I felt pretty terrible for having to turn people away from teaching. This will only drive me more into expanding this program down the road. The interview took place on Monday and the four candidates we felt who were best fit for the positions all accepted.

For the next few weeks, I will be getting together with both teaching teams to start on getting text books selected, course laid out etc... I am very excited to work with these four amazing and enthusiastic people who share my passion in technology education.