Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 08/02/2025Had fun speaking about creating your own budget friendly, trash-picked homelab at #jeffcon today! Super cool of my school district to put on an IT conference just for high schoolers. I would have *killed* for something like this 20 years ago. #edusky #csed 020
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 07/02/202542 hours. 200+ students. Pure creativity. At Creative Jam, teens built games, murals, music, movies—even a DIY smart treadmill & a scavenger-hunt wearable that shocks you if you're too slow to find and scan an item. Teens are *wildly* capable when given space to create. I love this job ❤️ #edusky 030
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 06/02/2025I decided to teach the TCP/IP model in an… unconventional way, today. Instead of a standard computer-facing lecture, I thought I'd move the lesson outside and have the students adopt the roles of each layer themselves. It was a blast! I can't wait to do it again next year. #csed #edusky 050
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 19/01/2025This perfectly explains why more of my people choose industry over education, despite many of them actually *wanting* to teach. The salary gap is so mind bogglingly wide, and the cost of living is so damn high, it can hardly even feel like a question. #edusky #csed 140
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 09/01/2025Looks like even GitHub Classroom isn't immune to floating point arithmetic errors 🙃 #csed #edusky 000
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 07/01/2025Decided to kick things off with a sorting exercise for the OSI model. I haven’t done one of these yet, so wasn’t sure how it’d go, but it was really cool to see some immediate evolution in understanding as they worked through the exercise. Definitely something I’ll do again! #edusky #csed 120
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 07/01/2025And we’re back! It’s going to be an exciting semester for both me and my students. First up: the OSI model! #edusky #csed 160
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 18/12/2024One thing I never got as a Director of Engineering? Bribes. Sweet, delicious bribes. Being a teacher is awesome. #edusky #csed 040
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 16/12/2024So proud of my students for being one of the few teams selected present their #NASA HUNCH project at NASA's Human Research Program Investigators Workshop next month! Doubly proud of our school as a whole for representing 24% of all of the teams nationwide that will be in attendance! #CSED #EduSky 000
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 12/12/2024Hey @notion.com, can y'all add a blink tag so I can *really* make sure my students pay attention to some of these deadlines? I'm like 36% positive none of them are epileptic. 000
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 12/12/2024It’s the last week of the semester, which means a little less work, and a little more play. We’ve been playing c-jump—a ridiculous combination of Chutes and Ladders and Candyland… but for #csed. 6/10 - well below their skill levels, but still fun (if not particularly addictive) www.c-jump.com 000
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 10/12/2024AI tip for students: give your favorite LLM (i.e. ChatGPT) a copy of the rubric for a given assignment, and ask for templates, suggestions, etc. to help you both *meet* and *exceed* expectations. Sometimes the hardest part is just getting started, which is something these tools are *great* at. 010
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 10/12/2024You used to be able to get ChatGPT to consistently miscount things (such as the number of “e’s” in “freezer”) but the latest models are a bit more reliable. That said, responding with any level of “are you sure?” can sometimes induce hallucinations as it attempts to “please” you. 030
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 09/12/2024It was really cool having Google come in to speak to the class about the product development lifecycle, and what it takes to go from idea to reality. Definitely an awesome way to kick off #CSEdWeek! 020
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 07/12/2024It’s nothing special, just the “safe” way to edit the /etc/group and /etc/gshadow files directly in something like vim or nano. I’m sure there are more acceptable ways to do it, but old habits die hard. 000
Zachary Flower @flower.codes · 06/12/2024My students have been having just a little too much fun with the dot matrix printer lately, and now these damn things keep popping up all over the lab. I’m not sure if I should be flattered or horrified. 030
