Author: AMH

Computing education for everyone, and maybe some CS also?

By AMH

Mark Guzdial has written some blog posts recently about having computing education for everyone that doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – look like computer science education. He has posts looking at this for both the undergraduate level and the K-12 level. I’m entirely on board with offering introductory computing and programming education from students with a range of disciplinary interests that doesn’t look like a typical CS1 class or have to cover the typical range of CS1 topics. However, I think a piece missing out of this discussion is whether there is value is teaching those courses in a … Continue reading Computing education for everyone, and maybe some CS also?

Miscellanea, March 2025

By AMH

The hardest working font in Manhattan: Excellent long read about a near-invisible font that appears everywhere, and the investigation into where it came from and why it is ubiquitous. Ultimately its a story of the analog versus the digital. Beautiful collection of illustrative photos throughout. Ran into this interesting research from last year about reconstructing protolanguages and developing models that can move from a protolanguage to the modern variants and backwards from a modern language to its ancestor. As for gaming this month…. Hooked on Bracket City as part of my morning word-game routine. The site started up on January … Continue reading Miscellanea, March 2025

Miscellanea, January 2025

By AMH

Going up a couple of days late, here’s some things I came across in the past month…. A new favorite comic from SMBC There is a variety of content at the ELIZA Archaeology Project site including the complete code of the text generation system with a description of the MAD language it was written in, a blog on the software archaeology process of recovering it, and a running version you can try out. The Calm Tech Certification (IEEE Spectrum article, project site, book) is a really appealing idea, both for consumers and as a tool for encouraging developers to think … Continue reading Miscellanea, January 2025

Miscellanea, October 2024

By AMH

The Merchants of Venice – In Code: A nice little review of early cryptology in 1400s/1500s Venice within both trade and politics Typing Bowl is only barely a game but it’s good for a five minute break to see if you can type faster than strangers on the internet. I’m not a big discussion forum person, but this massive list of topic-specific forums probably has some great content in here. I wish there was an index of the topic areas at the top of the page to help skim for what’s available. The recent post Of trashcans and thimbles by … Continue reading Miscellanea, October 2024

Miscellanea, September 2024

By AMH

Cool photos and breakdown of a Navajo weaving of an Intel Pentium chip from a display in the National Gallery of Art (sadly the exhibit now seems to be closed). The breakdown is able to map out the chip to determine specifically which chip it is based on. The blog post also closes with an interesting story of the Fairchild work on the Shiprock chip and the relationship to the Navajo. Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500: Scrollable visualization of computing, communication, and control from the 1500s to the present categorized by things like communication devices, … Continue reading Miscellanea, September 2024

Rear Adm. Grace Hopper and Future Possibilities

By AMH

I’ve been slowly listening my way through the recently released “lost” lecture from then-Capt. Grace Hopper entitled “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People” from 1982. I didn’t read much in advance about the content of the lecture, just decided to watch it as an interesting piece of history. It’s a very engaging and funny talk – about 8 minutes in I had to pause and go back and start listening again more closely. Her main opening premise: “I’m afraid we will continue to buy pieces of hardware and then put programs on them, when what we should be doing … Continue reading Rear Adm. Grace Hopper and Future Possibilities

Level Up

By AMH

These Maker Skill Trees are awesome. They cover a mix of life (cleaning, cooking, travel), “classic” (knitting, woodworking, automotive), and tech (3D printing, Linux, mobile app development) skills and give a nice visual map of how you might progress in developing your skills through increasingly more advanced projects. For example, get started baking by making something with a packet mix or making brownies, moving towards making homemade marshmallow or cheesecake and eventually up to a wedding cake or croquembouche. The civics and community tree ranges from registering to vote through running for mayor. It could be fun to have my … Continue reading Level Up

What is coding help?

By AMH

With semesters starting, there’s another flurry of conversation about how to teach programming when students have access to generative AI tools. Much of it is about assessment, where the size and context of your class makes a big difference (I have options available to me in a 20 student in-person class taught in a room with dedicated computers I have instructor control of that many other people do not). However, there’s also discussion of how to help students use generative AI as an assistant as they learn. I’ve been thinking a lot about one tool I recently saw promoted that’s … Continue reading What is coding help?

AI toys

By AMH

In addition to the more technical updates I’m making to my AI course, I’m collecting some fun AI toys that could make for nice first-day activities to get discussion going or otherwise bring some levity to the course. What Beats Rock? is easy fun. The game seems tuned to give you at least some benefit of the doubt that your chosen item will win that round of the battle. The generated explanations vary in how compelling they are. After a couple of rounds, much of the fun is not the AI but seeing if you can come up with a … Continue reading AI toys

A bit of nostalgia

By AMH

And now for a bit of nostalgia, as well as an opportunity to see if I’ve got WordPress access properly set up on my new tablet (if so, I’m hoping it will facilitate increased weblogging). A couple of weeks old now, but I appreciated this recognition of the 40th birthday of X Window System. My first programming job, a summer internship type position 32 years ago, had me learning UNIX by crash course, and most particularly figuring out how to write X Window configuration scripts. As the article notes, X Window offered the potential for customized and consistent windowing environments … Continue reading A bit of nostalgia