The Classroom - 2017-05-26

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CS Educators Meta

5:36 AM

0

Q: Should the title still be Computer Science Educators?

I believe that they're aren't that many people out there who are interested in a site that is only for Computer Science Educators. Personally, I'm a Java student, and my interest rate in this site is dropping exponentially. I think the site should be more open and broad so that more users will be...

discussion feature-request

5 hours later…

thesecretmaster

10:44 AM

Interesting SE Meta post about beta sites:

93

Q: The Real Essential Questions of Every Beta

The blog post Seven Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta gets linked to prominently from every beta's meta. However, this blog post is somewhat inaccurate and misdirects new users. In almost every beta, the site design question, for example, gets asked and undergoes a fair bit of discussion eve...

support faq beta-phase beta-sites

2

Also, to anyone who is a high school teacher, what are good ways of promoting the site at the high school level? Are there conferences that Comp Sci teachers go to? Is it all through connections?

3 hours later…

1:41 PM

That's like, meta meta :)

2:03 PM

The user visits dried up a lot yesterday, and so there aren't many upvotes to go around. I assume that, once we're in public beta (and can post some of our better questions to places like Reddit) that will get better

In the meantime, I'm trying to get answers to all of my burning questions right away, in case we don't survive!

2:23 PM

Welcome to the room, Danny. Are you a CS teacher?

3:13 PM

@thesecretmaster AP teacher communities. Twitter. With so many teachers going off to be trained for AP CS Principles, there's a lot of opportunity there. Digital word of mouth, especially since SE can be a tough site to get oriented to at first.

@thesecretmaster But a tip from experience: don't stress too much about the meta-discussion—focus on creating great content, voting on it and keeping the site clean first, I think

@Choirbean I think we are starting to see who is in and who is out in terms of what this site really is. The public beta will be key, so I see what we are doing now is laying the groundwork now so those who join us then will have something useful immediately.

Another thing to say is this: you don't tend to get many dedicated users joining just as the public beta launches; I'd guess everyone who will be the top users are already here, or will join very soon.

At least that's my experience with IoT

@Peter, I totally agree.

@Aurora0001, that's very interesting. But we still need to have more people coming to just browse the site and drop upvotes around.

It's only been a few days, but the overall stats are encouraging with respect to what SE expects.

I do wish more voting was happening. Another thought...should we be seeking to have answers "accepted" at this stage?

3:18 PM

@thesecretmaster, it's hard to invite people in many online forums right now, because we need their email addresses to invite them to the private beta. Once we have a public beta, we can just drop links to interesting questions on various sites, and that should start to drive some traffic

I was thinking about that, but when I looked at matheducators, only about 1 in 20 or 1 in 30 (roughly) gets that green accept check

@Peter It's hard to encourage people to accept answers, so I don't tend to worry about it too much

Good to know

On a more subjective site, accepting isn't always very useful, so it's fine to just not accept any answer

Out of every answer I've written, I only feel like one would be accept-possible. (And it wasn't accepted)

My thoughts as well. An early acceptance may prevent other, potentially better answers from coming along.

3:21 PM

@Choirbean I think most of the active voters on a site also happen to be very active contributors, and most users 'passing by' either don't have an account, or forget to vote anyway

I'm sure that that's true. Is there a way to encourage less avid users to liberally use the upvote button?

I've never found a way to encourage it

I always try to vote on as much good content as I can, and I hope that maybe that has some effect (e.g. if you see a question with lots of upvotes, you might be more inclined to vote yourself)

I think it does. When I was an early site user on SO, I rarely upvoted or downvoted, but seeing those numbers there prodded me on ocassionally.

I think encouraging constructive comments as well (largely by modeling them) goes a long way to building the quality and hopefully the number of up-votes as things get refined or clarified.

I don't know how I became so emotionally invested in seeing this little community succeed. I really, really want it to!

3:29 PM

It's partly a function of how long we've been waiting

It is! I committed to the last two attempts to create this community as well

It's been about 15 months since I posted questions in the definition phase. That's a long time to wait to see this come to fruition.

How far did previous iterations get

?

And I missed being the creator for this attempt on Area 51 by about a week (I wasn't checking back more often than that, because the previous proposal had completely stalled)

It got to about 44%, IIRC

Wow...so we are way ahead now

The expansion of CS teaching has probably played a significant role

I think partly that's because there are societal changes happening, and it was just too early. A year and a half later, the time was right

Haha we said the same thing :)

3:31 PM

I know I personally am in a much different place career-wise to bring me here

Two years ago I was teaching English

I was a music teacher

(Hence the name)

Awesome

Many ways of becoming a CS teacher I have learned

I discovered CS50 on edX and I was hooked

Life-changing

I left my graduate degrees and musical career, and migrated over to CS based on an undergraduate degree from decades ago. This is my 3rd year as a CS teacher

I just finished my first although the prior year was spent largely building CS curriculum, so it was CS-oriented

Well, that's not quite fair - in my previous school, I taught AP CS for 5 years, but that was one section a year, and I mostly viewed it as a fun change of pace from my regular music stuff

Are you loving it?

3:34 PM

100%

it's incredible

I'm in love with my job :)

I love the challenge, the openness, there's so much out there worth exploring

I've got to go. We'll talk more later - I'm really interested in learning about your program. Big picture stuff :

For sure. I'll be around on here a lot

Me too

l8r

thesecretmaster

3:43 PM

I wrote a meta post about SE wanting me to accept answers on questions that don't have acceptable answers:

34

Q: Have you considered accepting an answer or starting a bounty for this question? YES

I have been looking at my past questions, and noticed this message: Have you considered accepting an answer or starting a bounty for this question? I certainly appreciate the concern and the friendly reminder, but the 52th time I visit the page it starts to get a little bothersome. For that...

feature-request

4:19 PM

LOL I agree :)

That will be especially annoying on this site

2 hours later…

6:01 PM

I'm going on vacation for 3 days, so I won't be around much until Tuesday. Hopefully, things keep plugging along! What we need now is more questions, I think.

thesecretmaster

6:52 PM

We'll miss you!

CS Educators Meta

0

Q: Do we have "issues"?

On the tour page, under "Get answers to practical, detailed questions" it recommends that we "Ask about..." "Specific issues with Computer Science education." There are "issues" with CS education, but this site is about many other parts of CS education as well. It'd be really nice to rephrase it ...

feature-request tour

3

Q: Can we replace the "elderly" tag?

It feels like adult-education might be a better fit for our site, unless we expect that retirement facilities will be a focus here. The question, for reference: Programming curriculum for senior students (over 50 years)

discussion tags

2 hours later…

Henry WH Hack v2.0

9:08 PM

Hello good people

I have returned!

ok

test

thesecretmaster

Hi

Henry WH Hack v2.0

Hey

Henry WH Hack v2.0

9:27 PM

@thesecretmaster So did you do you toll your teachers about the site?

Like you where planning to do.

yesterday, by thesecretmaster

Kinda funny that I'm recommending this site to the comp sci teachers at my school, especially because I'm a student.

Oh you already did. Did you?

thesecretmaster

I did, I sent invites but I have yet to see the corresponding new users appear.

Henry WH Hack v2.0

ok

I am more on the IT side of things.

So I don't have much knowledge in CS

Computer Science came first.

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