My Brain Might be Full

As always CS & IT was amazing this year. I got back from California Wednesday night. Our presentation about CS Pricniples went well. At least I assume it did. Lots of good questions and no one threw anything.

Every presentation I sat in on was great. Ill summarize those later when I am a bit mor caught up and my kids stop asking who the strange lady walking around the house is. All the presentations are here.

Of course one of the best parts about the confernece is seeing everyone. I still find it a bit funny to talk to folks that wrote the books I turn to all the time in class. I have not yet asked anyone to sign anything, I dont want to come off as too stalker-ish.

We are still hard at work planning our own Virginia conference this September 28th. Lots of fun things planned for everyone. I hope to bring a small slice of the energy from CS & IT back home to Virginia.

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My Latest Project CodeVA

So anyone that has spent more than five minutes with me in the past three months has heard an earful about our new project. CodeVA is a non-profit focused on bringing computer science education to students and teachers across Virginia.

Launching in summer 2014 CodeVA brings two initiatives:

• Teacher Training
  • In partnership with Code.org CodeVA is working with four Virginiaschool districts to train new computer science teachers.
• Summer Camps
  • To bring computer science to kids across central Virginia CodeVA is running five summer camps.

Join us in bringing computer science to Virginia kids. Sign up for CodeVAs free monthly newsletter here. Well never share your information.

  

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And the Pig Had My Clothes In Its Mouth

Things overheard in the lab today - all good stories should end this way.

1) You know you teach at a rural school when...I also get offered live chickens and produce, so it is pretty good overall.
2) I both do and dont want to know the rest of this story. And no, I didnt ask. I used my super power, the teacher glare, we were all left hanging.
3) For the love of all that is holy this year needs to end.

Yup, we are still in school. It seems like every other teacher I know is out for summer break now. Pictures on Facebook of fabulous travels. And of course all the best people are at the APCS Reading this week.

And here I am trying to make teenagers learn, which according to all the people I spend my day with - specifically those between 14 and 18 - is completely unreasonable. Their brains are full, and it is sunny, so really I am mean. And nasty.

The funny part in between all of the grumbling they are actually working pretty hard. Except maybe the pig kid.

My intro classes are doing Codeacademy for their final project - make a web page about anything you want. Except pigs.

The AP kids are finishing up their final projects - thus the inside out computer project. The APCS Principles kids are finishing up the programming portfolio, so all in all some good stuff is happening.

And this is why I teach. Most days are pretty good, if not downright hilarious, and sometimes despite ourselves some information gets planted in their heads.

Nine days left people. Not that I am counting.

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Best Diet Ever Teaching my Butt Off

Seriously - crazy year, but good crazy. Great classes, great kids.

But the reality of teaching Computer Science in high school is a lot to expect. I teach 5 different subjects in a total of 7 sections. I have students assigned to me during my planning and lunch. I run a club, I tutor, I nag I cajole. I work evenings, and weekends, and for the record I have never taken a summer off. 

And some days I look down and realize I am dressed like Ms. Frizzle from Magic Schoolbus.

If you find me wearing this please call someone.

There are very few materials genuinely good materials out there for HS kids. Yes, Exploring CS and Codeacademy are changing that landscape, but compare these to what the average Spanish teacher or Algebra teacher has and it is pretty thin.

On the upside all this skipping lunch and running around means I have lost weight, which is great going into the holiday season.

So as I wind down 2012 I am super thankful for the opportunity to teach computer science. Happy to be out there trying to make it easier for the next group of CS teachers. Happy to have met so many great people along the way.

Have a Super New Year folks!

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How Do I Overclock My CPU

Overclocking could be both exciting and dangerous. The exciting thing about overclocking is that you could improve the computer’s performance up to 50%. This includes your processors, graphic cards and RAM. The dangerous part of overclocking is that it might damage your hardware permanently if you are not careful.

To learn how to overclock effectively and safely, I highly recommend you to download Overclock Your CPU.



Overclocking is basically like forcing your computer to work faster. Instead of walking, you are asking them to run. If you are careless in monitoring the heat, you might toast your hardware. Fortunately, there are programs that are able to monitor the heat and alert you if they are overheated. Some programs might automatically shut down your PC.

Personally, I have never done overclocking because I treat them as babies. Before you start, you should make sure you have good cooling hardware and heat monitoring programs for your computer.

So, how do I overclock my cpu?

Most overclocking works are done on BIOS. Before your computer reaches Window, you need to access the BIOS and configure the settings for your CPU, RAM and Graphic Cards.

Here’re 2 important tips while you overclock your CPU:

Don’t increase your performance 50% suddenly. It is dangerous to do so. Increase 10% and slowly move up.

Always search for opinions and reviews from people who had overclock their CPU and hardware on forums or search engines.

Click Here To Learn How To Overclock From The Professional

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My Secret Obsession

I have a thing for elementary classrooms. While the idea of teaching the 12 and under crowd is in no way appealing, all the projects and circle time really sound fun.

Here are a few of my favorites:

This one we have used already this year. It is great for doing Octal and Hexadecimal numbers. It really gets the point across that hex and octal are a more compact way of storing large values. When you pull the cups apart you have the number written inside...Ill try to post a picture of the Hex-Cups to make that clearer.

We already do the Analog-Binary Calculators - which my kids call Flippy-Dos, so the cups have become Roley-Dos. And seriously - the flippy-do is the easiest way to show twos comp for negative numbers.

This would be great for showing the sequencing of code. My beginning students have a hard time sometimes getting the ordering of the commands. This could be a fun way to demonstrate how important the order is. They could work in pars with a whiteboard and follow each others commands.

This project maps where a student is in their community. This is my next project for the CS Principles course. One of the my goals for the students is to understand that the Internet is a physical thing. My plan is to do these showing where they are on the Internet. They would be on the small circle in the middle - and then the structures that make up the Internet are on each of larger circles moving out.

This is a review game - the site includes the cards for the pockets. This would work well for AP style problems

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DISABLE DISPLAY OF DRIVES PARTITIONS IN MY COMPUTER

With this trick you can play with ur college pc...after this hack if some one opens my computer he/shell not see any drive in my computer.Open Registry Editor by typing "regedit.exe" in Run or in command prompt. There you navigate to registry entry HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindows CurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer Now in the right pane create a new DWORD item (by rightclicking and new->dword) and name it NoDrives ( case sensitive).
Now modify its value by double clicking it and set it to 3FFFFFF (Hexadecimal) .
Restart your computer. So, now when you click on My Computer, no drives will be seen.
To enable display of drives in My Computer, simply delete that DWORD item NoDrives that you created (it can be deleted by navigating to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftware MicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer and selecting the NoDrives and deleting it..del key...).
Again restart your computer.
You can now see all the drives again.

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