Editor’s Remarks
J. Philip East
University of Northern Iowa
Good day. Here is issue two of JCSE Online for this school year. We have a message from the Chair and two featured articles for you today. I hope you enjoy them.
Our Chair, Joe Kmoch, found time to put together some more words of wisdom for us. Actually, he considers them to be just some of his current thoughts rather than words of wisdom. Joe was a little concerned that he might be getting too IT-oriented for the SIG"CS" journal, but I don't see that at all. Most "CS" teachers do or are concerned with both CS and IT. Anyway, I think Joe's words are well worth reading. If you have a comment feel free to contact Joe. You might also send a letter to the editor (an e-mail to me) or send a comment to the SIGCS discussion list (sigcs@discussion.iste.org)
Joe Kmoch: Offshore Outsourcing…Coming to a Town Near You
Our first article is from Lawrence Leff. He wrote for us several years ago and this article continues his work in the footsteps of Lev Landa. Coincidentally (with a point Joe raises), Professor Leff's article discusses how we might teach programming in a way that overcomes student inability to "think". I personally found this article quite useful. I am curious about Landa's work and I intend to spend some extra time with this article during the summer when I think about my teaching for the next year (during the academic year, I am usually too busy teaching to think about teaching). Dr. Leff talks about Landamatics and how he uses it to help students develop their programming and thinking skills. I suspect this will be somewhat familiar to many as it involves patterns. The notion of patterns seems to crop up a lot. That is useful, for as we see different variations of the theme we gain more insight and are more likely to make use of it. I believe most of us can find several ideas we can use in our own teaching as we read this article from Professor Leff.
Lawrence Leff: Landamatics in Teaching Computer Programming
The second article is from David Ginat and Dan Garcia. This article also relates to thinking, though somewhat differently–it makes you think. Ginat and Garcia write about ordering patterns of list inversions, their number and width. This article is most appropriate as enrichment of a computer science teacher's understanding or a good student's skills and knowledge of computer science. In examining the two tasks of counting inversions and determining the widest inversion the authors illustrate applying different solution strategies to the problem. The strategies involve examining our prior knowledge (of sorting techniques in this case) to see how they might illuminate the current task. Thus, not only do Ginat and Garcia introduce an interesting problem but they also strengthen our repertoire of problem-solving strategies in a fairly explicit way. I hope you enjoy and profit from their thoughts.
David Ginat and Dan Garcia: Ordering Patterns and List Inversions
I hope you enjoy this issue of JCSE Online. As always let us know what you think. Also, consider submitting something–peer-reviewed article; favorite lesson or Web site; book, software, or workshop review; editorial; letter to the editor; etc.–anything helpful to middle and high school computing teachers.
Have a good day. Have a good year.
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