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A blog about Computer Science Education

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Untangling the Meaning of Object Oriented Programming

xkcd source This post began as a response to a teacher who posted in the Unity Teach Community Facebook group that he had been advised by college video game teacher that object oriented programming (OOP) is a key skill needed for success in collegiate video game programming. OOP was, in part, a reaction to increasingly…

A Warm Up for Capture the Flag

I have been using Capture the Flags (CTFs) in my classrooms since 2013 and been training teachers in their use since 2017. While I wholeheartedly appreciate the staggering amount of work picoCTF and Carnegie Mellon do and did, I always felt that there was a learning curve issue they were having difficulty meeting. At the…

Why You Shouldn’t Teach Recursion (Yet)

Picture taken from this presentation My esteemed colleague Shriram Krishnamurthi has written an interesting draft blog post on How Not to Teach Recursion that details some of the common, perhaps misguided, ways computer science teachers teach recursion. Let me start by saying that I agree with much of his criticism. Fibonacci is a contrived example…