Hélène Martin

High School Computer Science Belongs on the Web

I spent a good chunk of time this summer working on my high school computer science program’s website. I did it partly because I love tinkering with web stuff, partly to work on WordPress skills going but mostly because I think it’s critical to my teaching practice. Ordering my goals for the site helped me [...]

Why Build Your Own Blocks?

Scratch provides a drag-and-drop environment for experimenting with programming and building sophisticated interactive artifacts. Programming constructs are represented as blocks that can be dragged onto a scripts area to control the behavior of particular objects on the “stage.” Scratch provides all the common constructs from imperative languages — definite loops, indefinite loops, conditionals, variables, etc. [...]

TeachScheme teaches principles. What do the rest of us teach?

Bottom line: I challenge anyone who takes an objects-first approach to teaching introductory programming to provide an account of the order in which concepts are introduced tied to the CS principles they illustrate and to articulate reasons for their ordering based on cognitive load for the students (a paper reference will do, too). I recently [...]

Choosing a Java AP CS (CS1) IDE

I believe a teacher can improve his/her effectiveness simply by taking the time to deliberately decide what's important in an IDE and then choosing between different options based on his/her criteria. In my Java-based courses, I like to use jGRASP and eventually introduce Eclipse.

Motorcycle Repair and the Art of Overcoming Gender Roles

After being plowed down by an SUV while commuting on my scooter, I did the natural thing and bought myself a Kawasaki Ninja 250R. It’s a perfect bike for me but it still has involved a bit of a learning curve. Starting with a scooter got me used to being on two wheels but it [...]

TeachScheme Workshop at Brown University

I’m in Rhode Island for a week-long training on using the TeachScheme curriculum, a set of materials and philosophies for teaching introductory computer science (or is it programming?). I was able to come all the way out here for one of the free summer workshops through National Science Foundation funding — very cool. I’ve been [...]

Computer Science Teachers Conference (CSTA CS/IT 2010)

Yesterday was a long day well spent at Google headquarters for the Computer Science Teachers Association‘s annual Computer Science & Information Technology Symposium. It was a fairly modest gathering — I think there were about 200 of us (soon to be 10,000) – but a lot of great folks came out and there were fantastic conversations [...]

How to Create Computer Scientists

I was talking to my dad about the design of a first computer science course and I said something like maybe I was more inclined to want to teach programming early because it’s what drew me into computer science in the first place. I started writing some PHP scripts and BASH scripts to solve some [...]

A Principled Course

This summer, I have the opportunity to work with Larry Snyder from University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering department on his pilot of the CS Principles course. I’m thrilled to be part of the process: I’ve expressed skepticism in the idea of a first course in computing without much programming and I’m scared of [...]

Bellevue AP Institute Conclusion

I’m glad I went. It was an interesting glimpse into what other teachers are doing in their classrooms and a good reminder of how important a network and support structure are. I’m hoping all of us who participated will stay in touch and I’m sure our practice will be stronger because of it. I also [...]