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Ciphersoup

@ciphersoup.bsky.social

K12 computing educator based in the US

Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

They let me take a bulletin board! I need to up my bulletin board game, but this was really last minute. #CSEdWeek #TeamCompSci

White bulletin board with several signs for cs education week activities, and binary paper ring garlands.

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Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Students have been blowing me away with their work this year. The creativity and individual expression are amazing. It's been great seeing their excitement when sharing their creations. #Edusky #CSed #TeamCompSci

Collage of screenshots of various student-created games, each with its own look and feel.

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Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

Best. Job. Ever. (gaming controllers kids designed for the games they're coding) #EduSky #TeamCompSci #CSed

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Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

Thank you to all the participants in the Cybersecurity #Unplugged workshop at #CSTA25, and congrats to everyone for freeing their ducks with excellent code cracking skills. #CSed #TeamCompSci #releasethequacken All this thanks to the great staff and volunteers at @csteachersorg.bsky.social!

CSTA workshop participants holding yellow rubber ducks

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Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

This paper doesn't appear to say that. It appears to say that if you want to map an operation or do an aggregate operation, it's easier to have native functionality to do that rather than to construct it with a loop. I doubt most K5 students would easily grasp below without explicit traversal.

"• 1 + (1,2,3) evaluates to 2,3,4
• (1,2,3) + (2,3,4) evaluates to 3,5,7"

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Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

I read the paper, and I don't see them pushing up against computer science. It says that they felt marginalized by mainstream computing, which to me bolsters the case for fostering more of a sense of belonging. I saw 6.1-3 as them trying to make CS more inclusive. Can you elaborate?

Text reading: "4.2.2 No Place: Legitimacy Issues and Alienation from Conventional
Platforms. As a field, new media art shares its roots in computing
media and some history with computer science, but interviewees
felt that their methods were marginalized by mainstream computing
practitioners. Even those with an established research practice still
experience this legitimacy issue within the academic community."

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Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Your paper is cited a paragraph about belonging in the report that Guzdial quotes from: reimaginingcs.org/wp-content/u...

Text reading: "of belonging in CS (Lewis et al., 2017), a
phenomenon that exists even among the youngest
students (Master et al., 2016). Further, sense of
belonging is correlated with better academic
performance (Krause-Levy et al., 2021).

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Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

This is from the AP CS Principles framework, which specifies a national curriculum that allows for university credit across the country.

Text: "Procedures are referred to by different names, such as method
or function, depending on the programming language."

Text: "A procedure is a named group of programming instructions that
may have parameters and return values."

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Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

CSTA Level 2 (KS3) mentions both but doesn't have quite that level of specificity, and Level 3A (KS4) only mentions procedures. The standards don't mention 'subprograms' or 'subroutines' at all. I'm not saying we shouldn't differentiate, but our available resources in the US don't.

Create procedures with parameters to organize code and make it easier to reuse.
Students should create procedures and/or functions that are used multiple times within a program to repeat groups of instructions. These procedures can be generalized by defining parameters that create different outputs for a wide range of inputs. For example, a procedure to draw a circle involves many instructions, but all of them can be invoked with one instruction, such as “drawCircle.” By adding a radius parameter, the user can easily draw circles of different sizes.

Text: "Create artifacts by using procedures within a program, combinations of data and procedures, or independent but interrelated programs."

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Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Thank you to @urbanartsorg.bsky.social for a great wrap up to #CSEdWeek with their virtual game design workshop. It was great hearing from professionals from Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, as well as the awesome Urban Arts team. #games4ed

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Ciphersoup @ciphersoup.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

They're here! #TeamCompSci #CSEdWeek #rubberduckdebugging

Variety of themed rubber ducks on a wooden floor

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