I'm looking at textbooks for fall courses. There are plenty out there, including a lot free online. Some are too heavy for the intended audience, some are too light, some don't organize or present things in the way I'd like, and plenty are just mediocre.
What makes a book stand out as something I'd ask students to buy? Lots of useful diagrams and lots of exercises.
CS educators: do you have a favorite textbook (or online resource) for an undergraduate CS0 "introduction to computer science for non-majors" course? I'm thinking bits and files, processors and storage, how software works, networking, cybersecurity, careers in computing, a bit of social context, that sort of thing -- what every educated citizen should know even if they never write another line of code in their life.
I plan to teach some Python using Pygame and my own materials, but I'd like to at least touch on these other subjects.
This morning, Y7 class:
"...you'll remember we already know of four types in Python: Booleans, floats, integers and strings.
Respectively, the bad type, make your mama sad type, make your girlfriend mad type, and might seduce your dad type."
In a recent article in Inside Higher Ed , Stuart Zweben, a member of the ACM Education Board’s Actionable Enrollment and Retention (ACER) Task Force, and Co-author of “Computing Enrollment and Retention: Results from the 2021-22 Undergraduate Enrollment Cohort,” discusses the growth of Data Science as an undergraduate major and it’s implications.
Looking forward to the #csta2023 (Computer Science Teachers Association) virtual conference that starts today. Anyone on the platform at the conference? #csta#csed
Saw folks having fun here with Conway's Game of Life and wanted to have a go for myself with #Processing . I can definitely see students having fun building their own cellular automata
Just watched an ACM webcast on teaching computer science with tools like Copilot.
The profession of software development isn't about to go away, but it's going to change rapidly. What we teach may also need to change (just as we no longer spend much time on assembly language).
I am concerned that we may be on a path to paying a corporation to use stolen code (and burn a bunch of carbon) to solve our problems.