As a HS CS teacher, one of the ways that I can promote the subject is by seeing that students are recognized for their skills. One such way is to participate, (and maybe do well) in programming contests for high school students. This year there are 3 contest in Florida that we will send teams to: at Stetson University (held in November already), the ......

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I came across an O'Reilly Book by James Avery called "Visual Studio Hacks." (The word "Hacks" in the title is misleading.) It has over 400 pages of ideas on ways to improve your usage of VS. I like the book and even picked up a few things new to me. Here's one of them. There are times when you want to copy a portion of several lines of code, but NOT ......

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On Friday, December 16, I had a special visitor come speak to my programming classes. His name is Brandon McMillon. His official title is Academic Developer Evangelist. He lives in Tampa and covers Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. He started working for Microsoft in 1996, working for the Visual Interdev test team. In 1999, he moved to the Windows ......

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This is in response to a question about our school system's policy toward giving support and training to teachers along with new hardware. Well, the situation is not perfect by a long shot but they are making an effort. In fact the RFP for the laptop initiative included training to be provided by the vendor on the equipment. That is the good news. The ......

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Whenever I get to array data structures or strings in my classes, it is always with some trepidation that I point out that array indices start at 0 not 1, as might seem more natural to a beginning programmer. If the class is the non-questioning sort, I just go on. But if some one asks, "Why?", and I think they can handle it, I take the opening. Most ......

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The continuation of my day at Windows XP training has been delayed a few days while I battled a "home made" dose of food poisoning. The details are quite gruesome, so I won't post them here. Suffice it to say that I have been weak, without energy, (more than usual ;-) for the past few days. But I'm good to go now. The bulk of the day of XP training ......

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This is a first response to my day today. I'll post this intro now and then add more in a later post. I spent today with 40 of my Sarasota County Schools tech related collegues in an all day training session. It all started as part of a laptop initiative that our district started this past summer with several schools piloting the program. It gives (loans) ......

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For the past couple weeks in my Visual BASIC .NET class (9th and 10th grade novice programmers), we have been dealing with subroutines. The rationale for using them is another entire post. I want to focus on parameters. The key point is to distinguish between ByVal and ByRef. Since ByVal parameters receive a copy of the argument when the Sub is called, ......

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Welcome to my blog! I am here as part of the growing community of support for Computer Science Teachers. This blog is a vehicle for relating lessons and experiences that may be helpful to others in teaching CS to high school students. In this post, I will introduce myself and provide some background info. I teach Computer Science and Astronomy at Pine ......

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