It's interesting watching another human being learn how to think strategically. She's not quite there yet, as she has a hard time thinking of what her dad's response would be. I remember being like that, and I remember the chess drills I did in order to learn how to see ahead.

So instead of writing the blog post that I meant to write today, I took some time to teach her. No, I didn't coach her during the game. Instead, we wiped the board clean and I set out some pieces for one of the simplest drills, King and Rook vs King. I'd shown her this before. She'd successfully completed it with some coaching. It would be good for reinforcing the idea of thinking ahead.

She was moving the pieces somewhat randomly (although legally, of course). So I started counting to 50 moves, the limit on end-game dilly-dallying in tournament play. When I was getting close to 50, she We reached a draw during the first drill. Then I showed her how she needed to decide which side of the board she would force my king to stay on, and how that rook could keep my king there, then drive it backwards once it had the support of her king.

We did another drill, with plenty of sound effects. "I'm going to get you!" I exclaimed as my solitary king pursued her rook, step by step. She squealed and moved her rook to the other side. "Uh oh," I said when my king had nowhere to go but in front of hers. "Noooo!", I cried as her rook forced mine against the board. She checkmated my king with a little prompting.

We went back and forth a few times before she caught on that she needed to sometimes "waste" a move. When she could checkmate my king with no prompting, I reinforced the idea ("Pick which side of the board you're going to squish my king against, and focus on forcing my king back") and replaced her rook with a queen. I showed her how a queen can checkmate faster than a rook. She checkmated me handily, and finished the session thrilled with what she could do.

Why am I telling this story? I think it hints at why and how I teach. A lot of what I'm doing right now can be considered teaching, even though it looks different: my social media consulting with IBM, the book that I'm writing on Emacs... But I'm not teaching facts or procedures. I care about shaping attitude and so that I can unlock potential. I talk to people about blogging and bookmarking because I want to influence their attitude towards collaboration, and because I want to see what they'll do (so that I can learn from them too!). I talk about Emacs, but what's important to me is the "if I can tweak this, what else can I do with it?" kind of feeling that will unlock the rest of Emacs for other people.

But how do you teach culture?

On Technorati: teaching

Random Emacs symbol: bbdb-records - Function: Return a list of all bbdb records; read in and parse the db if necessary.

I'd been running on far too little sleep for the past few days - some five hours a day, I think. Nonetheless I managed to drag myself out of bed by 6:30, catching a few blinks on the commute and making it into IBM by 8:00. I just wanted to go back to sleep, but I was stressing out about the activity - and the fact that by 9:30, I needed to be vibrantly alive and enthusiastic.

Sometimes it's just not one of those days.

A spot of hot chocolate would've done me well, I think. However, there was not a single sachet of hot chocolate mix anywhere in the coffee area for my lab, not even in my apparently-no-longer-secret stash behind the tea boxes in the cabinet. No Hershey's Kisses in Stephen Perelgut's cubicle, either. In my distraction I'd forgotten about the Tim Horton's cafe at the end of the building. Instead, I went back to my computer and went through a few blogs in order to learn new things and thus stimulate my mind.

The class went okay, although it was unexceptional. The words felt thick and unwieldy in my mouth, unclearly explained. However, the kids did what they needed to, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how much they recalled from the activity two days ago.

As for me - I learned, yet again, that I need to take better care of myself in order to be at top form. =) I hate being blah. I hate fuzzy days. I'd rather wake up with a smile on my face and plenty of energy...

Note to self: don't volunteer for anything in the morning!

On Technorati: teaching

Random Japanese sentence: テーブルに猫の足跡が付いている。 There are footprints of a cat on the table.

I was terrified. I didn't feel prepared at all, having forgotten to put together colored slips of paper for the kids to write on. Well, I'd remembered the need for it, but not the actual colors. Not only was I worrying about how to do that, but the other volunteer briefed me on how challenging this group was and how little their tolerance for boredom could be.

In those frantic few minutes before the kids came through the door, I pulled myself together and came up with Plan B. Jennifer Schachter was awesome. She kept me focused by reminding me of the things we'd thought of doing, and that helped everything click into place. By the time the kids came in, I felt confident enough to fake the rest.

One of the things you learn as a teacher, after all, is to pretend that Plan B was the real plan all along. ;)

After a brief introduction, I gave the kids two minutes to read and write all they could about Hedy Lamarr. Then we went around the groups, each group naming a single fact about Hedy Lamarr. If they were the only group to write down that fact, they got five points. If they shared it with another group, each group earned three points. If more than two groups had that fact, each group earned one point. I also got them to look for information on Birute Galdikas and Ada Lovelace.

After the event, the other facilitators said they were surprised to find the kids so quiet and so engaged in a task. Whew!

I think one of the reasons why it worked was that the activity was structured so that everyone could be a hero, but no one could lose. That is, what the kids learned and wrote down could directly contribute to the team getting a point, but if the team got no points, it wasn't the fault of anyone in particular.

Anyway, that was tons of fun. Scary, but fun. =)

On Technorati: teaching

Random Japanese sentence: ネコでも王様を見られる。 Even a cat may look at a king.[Prov]

we will just help kids learn the basics of programming, logic formulation, flowcharting and the most important is their typing speed till they will reach 105 wpm.

Here's what I think about typing:

I find that as long as they can type without thinking about typing, they're fine. Get them to touch-type and they'll be okay even if they type slowly. The difference is that if you can't touch-type, you'll be looking at the keyboard, and thus not looking at the structure of your code. If you can touch-type, then even if you type slowly, you're still thinking about your code...

and about kids and programming:

What you really need to do is teach the kids to have _fun._ Show them that, and they'll learn whatever else they need to.

One of my favorite quotes is:

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Go back and think about what you found fun. What made you fall in love with computers? What was your passion?

I loved being able to explore. I loved being able to get the computer to do what I wanted it to, even if it was such a simple thing. And later on, when I discovered open source development, I loved being able to make a difference in other people's lives - even if it was just a very little difference... =)

Give kids inspiration by showing them what they can do. Give them time to play, to explore. Give them hints, not instructions. Help them discover. Let them own their work, let them feel that it is theirs. Don't make it a typing exercise. Make it fun. Make it interesting. Make it play.

On Technorati: teaching

E-Mail from edgardo bangga

Random Japanese sentence: 猫がソファの上に寝ている。 A cat is lying on the sofa.

I'm going to go on a bit of a rant because I feel that it's important to expose students to choices that they might not otherwise encounter on their own. I agree with Didith's main point at the end - that it's not about the tools - but my particular bone here is that university's also where students should learn to abstract general principles.

This is how I understand the educational system's _supposed_ to work: people who want to learn about specific things go to vocational schools and workshops, and people who want to learn about abstractions and things they'd never encounter on their own go to university.

We shouldn't teach Microsoft Word. We should teach writing (note: not even word processing). We shouldn't teach Microsoft Powerpoint. We should teach presentation. We shouldn't teach Microsoft Excel. We should teach data analysis.

The problems these students face go _way_ beyond the tools. You can inflict death by bullet point in OpenOffice.org Impress just as easily as you can in Microsoft Powerpoint. So why not spend valuable class time talking about the principles of the thing instead of the tools? (Oh, if I had a dime for every word someone's read off the slides...)

Here's a quote that captures what I think:

Fill them with the longing to write wonderful articles and make effective presentations! Inspire them through your examples! Help them reach out through their words! As long as students write only for their teachers and their classmates, you'll see bad prose and hear people read off slides. Show them examples, point out common mistakes and show them how they can improve, and put them in front of audiences that care about what they're interested in... If you can set them on fire, they'll _learn_ about all the nifty tricks hidden in whatever software they use - and it will be about the result, not the tool!

Note to self: I need to learn how to write really, really well. I also need to learn how to present really, really well. Then I need to figure out how to teach this while inspiring by example. I _so_ want to run a class on "Communication for Geeks", or something like that. ;)

But wait! Wasn't this supposed to be a rant about open source in education and how students should be exposed to open source alternatives?

I've written a fair bit about this in the past, but let's look at the Atenean case more closely. For the sake of argument, let's assume that there _aren't_ financial reasons to choose open source. The stereotype of the Atenean student is a middle-class or rich student who can well afford to buy legitimate versions of Microsoft Office. Truth is, quite a few people are on scholarships. Besides, most people quite happily pirate software or use whatever their computer dealer "bundled" with their computer because they just don't care about software rights or they don't think Microsoft deserves even _more_ money.

So let's ditch the financial and ethical incentives, and talk about the pedagogical one instead.

I taught for a short while, and even that short a while was enough to make me feel the pressure to cover everything in the curriculum. If a teacher's already having a hard enough time covering all the little features of one thing or another, how on earth is that teacher going to find time to explore and discuss alternatives? Won't that confuse the students and make them lose confidence?

I feel quite strongly that we should drag people out of their comfort zones every so often, particularly in university when they can mess up without losing money. I suspect that one of the best ways to check whether students can abstract the notion of, say, emphasizing text is to throw them at an unfamiliar but usable word processor like OpenOffice.org and see if they can figure out what to do. (Open source geeks can substitute "Microsoft Word" or "Emacs" as appropriate.)

I _want_ to make students feel a little bit uncomfortable. That discomfort is what drives learning in the future, where it's most important. I don't want students to stick only to what they know how to do. They should keep learning!

This belief is probably not going to make me very popular with students, most of whom would like to get through school with as little effort as possible - but we need to help them develop critical thinking and abstraction, and we need to help them figure out how to figure things out.

I think that to know one thing is to know that one thing, but to know two things is to know two things, their similarities and differences - _and_ to know that I can learn more.

It doesn't even have to be open vs closed source. It could be two closed source ways of doing things, two open ways of doing things, whatever. But it has to be sufficiently different to force the students to think about their abstractions and to expose bugs in their understandings... =)

Hey, would _you_ test a program with only one test case? ;)

On Technorati: learning, teaching, oss, opensource, communication

Random Japanese sentence: 「いいえ、ぼくです！、ぼくです！、ぼくです！」 百匹のねこ、千匹のねこ、百万匹、一億、一兆匹のねこがいいました。どのね こも自分が一番美しいとおもっていたのです。 No, I am! I am! I am! Cried hundreds and thousands and millions and billions and trillions of voices, for each cat thought itself the prettiest. [M]

From http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/a/o/aog103/Tutor%20Manual/feedback2_mxplan.html :

This set of instructions for the tutor to take into account when tutoring is very helpful and lets the tutor know that it is not all about lecturing the student in the session. The student should speak more and the tutor should let the tutee set the agenda, this is how the tutee will really learn the subject matter. Also the tutor must keep a positive attitude so that the tutee stays positive about the subject and does not just give up. I chose this list because it is more descriptive than the first list, and it is more of an agenda helper while the last list was overall ideas that should come natural to the tutor.

I can use this list because it entails that the tutor will carry out these tasks so that the tutee is comfortable working with me. I think it is important for every new tutor to know that this is very important. You want to make the student feel welcome in the tutoring center, and you want to feel comfortable and personal in a session.

I would remove the parts that mention reading/writing because I am a math tutor, but overall this is a great list that every tutor can use.

On Technorati: teaching, education

Random Japanese sentence: Ａ ｓｐｏｔ ｏｆ ｓｈｕｔ−ｅｙｅ は、また猫のいねむりともいわれている。猫は１度に２〜３分しか寝ない癖があるからだ。 "A spot of shut-eye" is also called a cat nap because a cat is in the habit of sleeping only a few minutes at a time.

Today one of the members brought his girlfriend to listen to his first speech. The girl was painfully shy and clearly terrified of public speaking, even during the Table Topics and guest comments section.

She approached me afterwards, though. And oh, the stories I could see inside her... CN Tower Stair Climb T-shirt, colored bands around her wrists: these are the marks of someone who cares deeply about some things. I listened to her fears and shared my own experience learning how to speak - at first starting out because I couldn't stop talking about technology and I wanted to get into conferences for free, and then realizing how much fun it was to help people learn. I told her that the real trick to speaking in front of an audience - or at least in front of Toastmasters - is to speak to them one person at a time, treating them as your friends.

Most of all, I looked into her eyes and told her in many different ways that she had stories worth telling.

When I felt her tentatively reaching out, I closed the loop and we hugged. The hug was one of the best I've ever had, and her thank you one of the sweetest.

This is what I live for: that deep connection, that chance to help people find their voice.

On Technorati: toastmasters, teaching

Random Japanese sentence: 猫がソファーでねむっている。 The cat is sleeping on the sofa.

On Technorati: teaching, gradschool

Cindy shared how seminars on teaching technique greatly helped her manage her classes. She runs an end-user training company that caters to children and adults. This is how her new hires learn how to teach:

1. Take a course even if you already know the content. You need to learn about technique.
2. Practice and play around with the product until you feel comfortable with it.
3. Practice teaching the subject to your teacher, who can give you feedback on unclear or incorrect things.

We all think that teachers have to spend a lot of time walking around, keeping an eye on students' progress and making sure everyone can keep up. =)

Cindy also shared with us her thoughts on the need for good textbooks, and the abysmally low pay for writing such!

By asking questions, Roy helped me narrow down what I want to do. We came up with something along the lines of:

1. Find out who my market is and what they need. I'd like to focus first on finding highly-motivated teachers in private technical/vocational schools and colleges. I want to find out what they need.
2. ...
3. Profit! ;)

Heh. Well, must figure that out sometime.

That isn't the only way, though. Dominique told me about Positive(?), an initiative to help improve computer science education in colleges. (Whee! I'll just piggyback on that.) Charo told me about Voice of America(?) and that one can actually do quite a lot without major financial backing.

Anyway, here are the main insights:

• I might be able to turn this into a business. A business means I might be able to attract other people to get into it.
• I might also be able to get this funded by philanthropists. To do that, I need a good program.
• I can start small. Let's change my corner of the world first.
• Motivation is key. We spent a bit of time talking about how to deal with closed-minded people and people who don't want to share their knowledge. I'm in favor of going after people who don't need to be persuaded to share their knowledge. I want to find people who can't help but teach.
• Mentoring is very important, but most teachers are on their own in classrooms. Waah. Maybe there should be something like Toastmasters, but for teachers... ;)

On Technorati: education, teaching

When your job becomes your mission, your primary concern is giving your best in everything you do. Knowing that you have contributed significantly towards the creation of a product which can make a difference in your company and the larger community is reward in itself.

We can make a difference no matter who or what or where we are. If we know _why_, then the _how_ follows. =)

On Technorati: passion, career, life, motivational, inspirational, teaching, education

By the time one of my friends told me to just Go Ahead and Apply for It, the deadline had long passed. I e-mailed Brenda Fung telling her that I was interested, anyway.

Good thing I did. I just got e-mail from her asking me to get in touch with one of the professors in order to discuss my teaching qualifications. And good thing my previous classes gave me plenty of comments on my TeachingEvaluations, too (although most of them were about candy)...

Teaching. I miss asking and answering questions. I miss racking my brain for examples and analogies. I miss seeing that aha! moment. I miss teaching. I miss waiting for people who never come during consultation hours. Sheesh, I even miss checking papers. I've got this awesome collection of gel pens now, which is good because I prefer to check in green, purple or some other non-red color.

I think teaching will certainly make the year fun.

I should read phdcomics again...

On Technorati: teaching

Guided Lecture: Students listen to 15-20 minutes of lecture without taking notes. At the end, they spend five minutes recording all they can recall. The next step involves learners in small discussion groups reconstructing the lecture conceptually with supporting data, preparing complete lecture notes, using the instructor to resolve questions that arise.

Immediate Mastery Quiz: When a regular immediate mastery test is included in the last few minutes of the period, learners retain almost twice as much material, both factual and conceptual.

Individual Task With Review: Problems to solve that apply the concepts presented. Students complete a worksheet or other task and compare the results with their neighbors before the whole class discusses the answers.

Intrinsically-Phrased Reward Statements: Positive expressions about emerging learner performance and achievement highlight internal feelings of self-worth and self-satisfaction (without praise, which is an extrinsic judgment). Enjoyment "That was fun!" "I get pleasure from that, too." Competence "You did it!" "That is mastered!" Cleverness "That was tricky." "Creative." Growth "You've taken a step forward." "Change has occurred!"

Construction Spiral: Ask a sequence of questions, beginning at a reflex level, in a three-step learning cycle—(1) individual writing for 3-5 minutes, (2) small group sharing in trios or pairs, and (3) whole class, non-evaluative compilation. Used to construct understandings and concepts.

Peer Teaching: By explaining conceptual relationships to others, tutors define their own understanding.

- Question Pairs—learners prepare for class by reading an assignment and generating questions focused on the major points or issues raised. At the next class meeting pairs are randomly assigned. Partners alternately ask questions of each other and provide corrective feedback as necessary.

- Learning Cells—Each learner reads different selections and then teaches the essence of the material to his or her randomly assigned partner.

CS21A.Teaching

- changes made - problems encountered - solutions tried/found - outstanding problems - plans for next step

I don't expect everyone to have a fully-working game by tomorrow, so most of your partial points will come from the notes. "It doesn't work." isn't enough; I need to know why it doesn't work, if it used to work before, what you've tried doing to get it to work, why you think it doesn't work, etc.

Along the way to your first milestone, you may have encountered the following problems:

- ObjectInputStream seems to hang when you create it.

That happens when both sides of the connection try to create object input streams at the same time, but the other side hasn't opened an object output stream yet. Fix: create the object output stream first before you create the input stream.

ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(socket.getOutputStream());
ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(socket.getInputStream());

- Your program lags terribly.

How are you doing your networking and repainting code? If you're doing animation, repaint() should be in one thread and your networking code should be in another. You shouldn't do them in the same thread because then repaint() will only happen whenever something is received from the socket connection. Also, make sure you have delays somewhere! while (true) { repaint(); } means your CPU will spend most of its time repainting. Add a Thread.sleep in that loop so that your computer has time to do other things.

- You can't write certain objects over the stream.

Make sure the object is serializable and all of its attributes are either transient or serializable as well. You really shouldn't be sending your entire application over the network - what is the other side going to do with all those textfields? Mark many of your attributes transient or create a small, simple object that encapsulates the data you need to send.

- You've sent an object over the network connection and you're calling methods on it on the other side, but the one on the first computer isn't changing!

That's the way it works. If you send an object from computer A to computer B, computer B isn't working on the original object but on a copy of it. Any changes on A won't be automatically sent to B and vice versa. The correct thing to do is examine the object and perform different actions locally.

If you really need to get something like this working and you have plenty of spare time, read up on RMI (Remote Method Invocation). It's out of the scope of CS21B, though.

For tonight, I want lots and lots of notes.

TOMORROW: Data structures (stacks, queues and linked lists).

Time to defrag.

I am all the more unusually loquacious because I have just finished writing a lab exercise for the introductory computer science course for which I am a teaching assistant. My pitiful effort at making "Hello, World!" fun and exciting can be found at http://courses.ateneo.edu/cs21a/lab1.html , with no guarantee that it'll actually even be used in today's CS session. I'm banking on the fact that Dr. Sarmenta probably hasn't prepared materials as detailed as this, as I haven't seen anything like it from, well, any of my CS teachers. I'm _hoping_ that he'll let me deliver the class, which is a far-out possibility but still worth considering. I also hope I'll be awake enough to do so with wit and style.

I love the project submission system I wrote last semester. After editing the postgresql start script so that the postmaster would accept TCP connections, I simply had to set up the database and run a script that obligingly extracted and included all the students in the student data files that the department forwarded to me. All 222 students of CS21A in 9 sections have been set up. How nice.

Teaching. Hmm. I had dinner with Mario Carreon (an old friend from high school competitions) the other night. He teaches at UP and is considering moving to the industry because of the pay. We talked about teaching, mainly, and in the course of our conversation I found myself declaring that yes, this is it - I cannot imagine myself in any other profession except teaching. Especially college level introductory computer science. That's it.

Naturally teaching doesn't stand on its own - I must be teaching _something_, and teaching also offers ample time for research. Enter wearable computing. I'll be getting my gear on the 23rd, if all goes well. Expect lots of files going on and on about how cool it all is.

Speaking of cool, I also find myself getting interested by game development. Eric, Diane and a few of my other friends are getting together and starting a game company. As the insane computer science student that I am (and hope never to stop being), I have decided that the challenge of breaking into a new field (at least one I'd never been in before) and learning enough to not only understand what Eric talks about when he enthusiastically describes his latest engine but also to offer suggestions and whip up a demo on my Linux box is somewhat comparable to the feat of... well, _something._ I'm crazy enough to think that it's possible, and it should give me something new to learn.

To that end I have been playing around with small OpenGL programs here on my Linux laptop. Not that my hardware can easily handle the demands of 3d graphics programming, but I manage to squeak by with Emacs, gcc, a Makefile and lots of Googling. I have to confess that what excites me about games is not the funky graphical effects but rather the gameplay and the character and setting development - witness the sudden explosion of Inform text adventures in my ~/notebook/games directory.

Nonetheless, I will climb Mount Everest just because it's there. <impish grin>

School?

Oh, school's been fun. My teachers are nice.

I yawn, and I must sleep.