CTFing in the World of AI
New to CTFs? Check out WarmupCTF. Much like everything in the world, AI has completely changed the way CTFs need to be designed. Challenges that used to be hard are now easy. As one example, my favorite trick used to be xor encoding flags in executables using a fake flag like cyber{lolnottheflag!} and seemingly random…
NJ Computer Science Praxis? Not so much.
UPDATE October 15, there was a miscommunication with the NJDOE and you do have to take the Praxis exam. Recently, I blogged about the consternation over NJ’s new 1820 Computer Science Credential. After much craziness with the NJ Department of Education (NJDOE), I learned it was mostly nothing to worry about. I had a very…
Demystifying the Praxis Computer Science Test (5652)
Of late, states are trying to codify the credential pathways for computer science teachers. For example, New Jersey has mandated that 6th-12th grade teachers (but not, mercifully, K-5th grade teachers – Correction: K-6th grade teachers with no more than one-half of the daily instructional assignment) who currently teach computer science (and have good evaluations) are…
Repurposing ChromeBooks
Our school, like many school, has had no choice but to end of life a significant amount of ChromeBooks. Without wading into the ewaste debate, I took it upon myself as a personal challenge to find a way to make these ChromeBooks, which could no longer run ChromeOS, useful for the classroom. This turned out…
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…
How I Teach vim
The positive response to my post about “Why I Teach vim” has been extremely appreciated and the most common question I have received is “OK, but how do you teach vim? This is a much more difficult question to answer in a blog post as I have repeatedly found trying to explain teaching methods in…
Why I Teach vim
The why of why people use vim has been covered fairly extensively, so I thought I would spend a little time explaining why I teach vim to my high school students, even in 2020. It all began when I was assigned a mixed class of ninth through twelfth grade students in computer science just after…
Last Meeting – Bill Atkinson and HyperCard
Guest blog post by Jay Michlin, circa 1987 (used with permission). A recounting of a presentation by Bill Atkinson at the Stanford Macintosh User Group (SMUG) HyperCard. Bill Atkinson. The auditorium was packed and everyone stayed until the end.What more need be said? I considered stopping this month’s report right here, because the first paragraph…
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