octojon @octojon@cybre.space

I'm using a new account at @octojon now!

Writing for curriculum/education is hard, sometimes you need to sit and flip the Thought Pancake until it makes sense and sometimes you need to write until you've pulled the whole creature and all of its tentacles out onto your desk.

Public school teachers should be concerned with developing and fostering anti-capitalist computing education, but 90% of university CS educators are ideologically opposed to this work.

Part of the problem with CS education being so higher-ed oriented is that the politics of capitalism end up colonizing public schools, where the issues of teaching and learning computing are very different than those in university programs.

I think I'm still coming to terms with the fact that the vast majority of CS education research has to do with teaching coding to people who *already know how to code*

Whenever someone poses the question "what does a hobbyist-friendly programming language look like" I'm always torn between "it doesn't, focus on teaching better" and "we already have Lua, what more is there to ask for"

Turns out you need hard drive space to boot your computer? Who knew

Committing some music tech crimes

Bonus points if there's a specific concept the game would be particularly suited to teach

Extra bonus points if the game is weird :)

I'm considering making some tutorials to help students learn basic coding stuff by making clones of games. I have some generic ideas for clones (Galaga, Pac-Man, some kind of platformer, SimCity, etc.)

What other games stand out to you as good candidates for this kind of thing?

Catch me searching "OP-1 tactile switch stabilization plate" and sobbing

Absolutely infuriating seeing a great component in the wild and not being able to find it at any distributors. My biggest barrier to success is likely that I don't know the names of things.

Again--lots of folks are posing answers to this question in a really compelling way. I hope folks' work toward equity-centered CSEd, critical computing education, and many other lines of inquiry start finding themselves at the center of K-12 CSEd.

I'm really interested in seeing how the field begins to answer a really important question: "why should we teach CS to kids if most of them won't actually *work* in CS?" And because CS is so entangled with capital, I think the debate will be pretty contentious.

CSEd hasn't had that philosophical debate yet, at least not at the same level of rigor as other fields like MuEd. People are starting--critical computing in K-12 is part of that process. But most of the field still orients itself around HE paradigms.