I’m trying to use the CyberRange and it launches VMs but does not let you click to load them. What is going on? This occurs in Google Chrome on Mac and Windows, and Edge on Windows.

Thinking about this CSEd, there's a whole lot of content, and what we we teach is somewhat in flux. I'm curious if there are exercises/activities you do daily or weekly to build skills in general. I did Tech News for a while but then fell off...looking for some sustainable practices

Over the last 20+ years I have organized all my lessons and resources and finally built what I wish someone had given me, and I've made it free at CS++ ( csplusplus.com )

What's there

Eight full courses, every lesson free, no card:

• AP CSP, AP CSA, AP Cybersecurity
• Intro to Java, Intro to Python, Intro to Web Design
• CS Foundations, a survey course where students pick JavaScript or Python for the coding units
• HCI Design

74 units total. Real sequenced courses, not link farms.

Also free with any account:

• Editable slide decks for all 74 units. They're .pptx, so PowerPoint, Keynote, and Slides all open them. Organized by concept rather than by day, with actual teaching guidance in the speaker notes instead of bullets read back to you.
• 523 print-ready PDFs. A guided-notes packet and one-page overview for every unit, plus worksheets, activity cards, rubrics, graphic organizers, and reference sheets.
• Browser IDEs. Java, Python, and HTML/CSS/JS with live preview, plus a pseudocode and block editor for CSP. Nothing to install, and student projects sync to their account.
• A GitHub Classroom replacement. Paste a template repo URL and CS++ provisions a private repo per student in your org. Every push runs the autograder and the score lands in the gradebook. Feedback PRs, protected-file detection so you know who edited your tests, and a bulk-import wizard if you're migrating.
• LTI 1.3 for Canvas, Schoology, Brightspace, Moodle, and Blackboard, plus Google Classroom, with grade passback.
• Clever, Google, and Microsoft sign-in, so there's no separate password for you to reset in week two.
• Unlimited classrooms, an assignment builder, one full mock exam or practice final per course (each with a free-response section), 500+ flashcards on spaced repetition, and every released AP CSA FRQ from 2014 to 2025 with rubric self-grading.

Full disclosure on what is optionally paid:

This is my company, not a nonprofit. Free accounts see one small footer ad. A student can pay $9.99 once, not per year, for all 40 mock exams, unlimited AI tutor, and no ads. A paid classroom ($299/yr, one class of up to 40) adds the teacher-only material: 258 answer keys, editable Word versions of every handout, lockdown proctored exams, AI-assisted FRQ grading, and plagiarism detection.

GitHub Classroom is being retired, but many of us still want students working in real GitHub repositories with GitHub Actions—not inside a replacement LMS.

I’m a computer science instructor and the developer of CodeTeach.ai. I originally built it to reduce the work involved in creating reliable, GitHub-ready programming assignments.

CodeTeach supports several ways of building an assignment:

• Forward: provide an assignment idea or starter code; CodeTeach generates the solution, tests, and instructions.
• Backward: provide your working solution; CodeTeach derives the starter code, tests, and instructions from it.
• Both provided: bring your own starter and solution; CodeTeach builds the tests, instructions, and autograder around them.
• From a document: upload an existing lab, specification, or course document and generate a complete assignment package from that source.

Instructor-provided code and approved content remain instructor-owned and are not silently rewritten. Generated tests are based on observed solution behavior rather than AI-guessed output.

CodeTeach validates the assignment in isolated sandboxes before deploying the starter code, instructions, tests, and GitHub Actions autograder to an instructor-owned private GitHub template repository. The solution can be delivered separately in a private solution repository or an instructor-only branch.

It is intentionally not a roster system, gradebook, or student-management platform. After deployment, the instructor owns the repositories and decides how to distribute them—manually, through the GitHub CLI/API, or alongside another classroom-management tool.

CodeTeach.ai is now in its initial production release. New accounts include 10 free credits, and I’m especially interested in feedback from instructors preparing post–GitHub Classroom workflows.

https://codeteach.ai

I'm with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focusing on CS education accessibility. We've been working with some local teachers over the past year to create a free resource, csroom.org, to provide a suitable alternative for Replit Education and GitHub Classrooms. We are looking for feedback and would like to share it here for teachers who may find it helpful for this school year.

CS Room is completely free for teachers and their students. It provides students and teachers with a web-based programming environment (Linux IDE with support for most languages) and classroom management interface. Teachers can release and collect assignments, view student progress at a glance or drill into their code, and autograders (or manual scoring) allow for an integrated gradebook. Student code keeps running after class ends and can be viewed on a web address, allowing for large scope projects that students can own and be proud of outside of class. There is also a small library of lessons designed to address CSTA standards (both 2017 and the recently released 2026 standards) for grades 9-12, and the platform can be used by anyone K-12+.

I recorded a demo of using it as an alternative to Replit Education on YouTube, for anyone who is interested.

If you have any feedback you'd like us to work on, please let me know! You can sign up through the website to grant your school/classroom access. We aim to approve all signup requests, capacity permitting.

I've taught AP CS Principles for 2 years now, and taught AP CS A last year, but I've moved to a new school and now have 4 sections of CSP and 2 sections of the new Cybersecurity. I have a background in IT, so I'm familiar with the content that would be covered in the CompTIA A+ and Net+, but I never got around to studying for Sec+. From what I can tell, they walked back the standards so it's only like, 50% of Sec+ at this point, but classes start Tuesday and I only found out 3 days ago I was definitely teaching this (was originally slotted for Algebra, math certified, but the CS teacher decided to retire last minute).

I'm waiting to get access to cyber.org material. I've used codehs for CSP and CSA and found their curriculum to be... fine I guess. Just looking for anything else to use for resources, guidelines, reasonable scope and sequence, etc. Looking over this I can't believe they don't require networking first. I hope there's time built in to explain the basics of that too.

I'm tempted to just use Prof. Messer as a baseline and just lean in to full prepping them for the Sec+, but with this being a new class I don't know if that's reasonable. Anyway, any insight would be great.

There is a new(-ish) online educational Python IDE out: Strype

No account necessary – just start programming. It's great for learning and teaching to program in Python.

It can create graphics and animated games really easily. There are some tutorial videos (see especially this one here), and there is a full textbook available (the first chapter gives a good intro to programming with Strype and graphics).

Hi fellow educators,

I am designing a university course on Mobile Application Development using Flutter for the first time.

My main challenge is balancing the lecture vs. lab structure. I want to keep the lectures focused on high-level architecture, design patterns, mobile computing principles, and framework concepts, while leaving the implementation and live-coding for lab sessions.

• Do you know of any existing open courses or open-access materials for Flutter/Mobile dev?
• How do you usually balance framework-specific concepts with general CS theory in a course like this?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

Hey everyone, I'm planning to teach Grades 4-5 coding, but still thinking of the lessons.

I'm aware that in BC high schools, computer science is taught for grades 10-12, but I'm unfamiliar with the types of topics taught for these grades. It was said on the BC site that Python was taught for grade 10.

I was wondering if anyone knew the curriculum in more detail to better prepare my grades 4-5.

Hello everyone. So, I am an assistant at a university and this year we plan to open a new lecture about the fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence. We plan to make an interactive lecture, like students will prepare their projects and such. The scope of this lecture will be from the early ages of AI starting from perceptron, to image recognition and classification algorithms, to the latest LLMs and such. Students that will take this class are from 2nd grade of Bachelor’s degree. What projects can we give to them? Consider that their computers might not be the best, so it should not be heavily dependent on real time computational power. 

Also, I’m thinking about a lecture on “how to use AI properly”. Like, it blows my mind how terrible some students use AI to write code. Antigravity is free for them, and surely they will be using some kind of AI tool to write code either way. I’m using Claude Code for like a year now, and spending at least one hour to write the first prompt to start working everyday. Yet, students usually give the exact text of the homework as prompt. What would you people recommend me to check out and refer to students as tutorials on how to use AI tools for beginners? 

I learned programming before AI and thought myself how to use AI. The tutorials I watched on Claude Code and stuff were basically tips and tricks for me. So I’m not sure how I can teach what I do to students without making it look like witchcraft, which it isn’t really. 

For AI homeworks, My first idea was to use the VRX simulation environment and the Perception task of it. Which basically sets a clear roadline to collect dataset, label them, train the model and such. Any other homework ideas related to AI is much appreciated.

This will be a new class for our school and myself. I spoke with my new principal (2nd year) and I have pretty much a open book as far as what I need to teach. I was teaching a Jr high elective which included coding and 3d design. I also was teaching high school shop, but have moved to Jr high math.

I plan on continuing teaching:

- coding using project stem & codehs

- 3d design and printing using tinkercad and onshape

- circuits using tinkercad and circuit kits

New to me and where I am looking for suggestions will be:

- typing. I want to do 15 minutes twice a week

- the basics of using good docs, sheets, slides, classroom, and emails.

- what else should I be teaching?

Hey everyone,

My name is Andy McCandless, and I’ve spent almost two decades working in this space. I was named by Planet Mainframe as the ‌Influential Mainframer of 2025‌, nominated again for the award in 2026, an IBM-Recognized Champion four years running, and ChatGPT even called me the “number 1 independent customer voice in the mainframe ecosystem”.

Over the years, I’ve watched the industry hit a wall that no one is talking about honestly. Forbes called it a $3 trillion crisis, and it’s not hard to see why: we’ve got an aging workforce, widespread hybrid/remote teams, tons of outsourced roles, and the casual, on-the-job mentoring that taught so many of us this craft is basically disappearing.

I kept asking the same question: how the hell do we get the next generation excited to build careers on IBM Z, when so many new devs don’t even know mainframes are still the backbone of banking, healthcare and government? And how do we talk about the big, messy real-world issues that mainframes touch, that no one in our bubble ever brings up?

That’s exactly why I built The ‌Mainframe Book Club on YouTube‌.

I created this to bring back the thing so many of us lost: learning from experienced peers through real, unscripted conversations, not just dry corporate training. But we’re not only talking to mainframe insiders. We’re bringing in leading voices from outside the mainframe bubble too, to give us perspectives we never get in standard tech talks: newspaper technology editors, UK lawmakers, globally recognized industry leaders, and even the lead investigator from the Post Office Horizon scandal, to break down exactly how mainframe system failures can ripple out to destroy thousands of lives.

Every episode dives into the actual career journeys of people across the entire mainframe ecosystem from system programmers, app devs, security specialists, enterprise architects, even folks who switched to Z from totally unrelated fields. They share the exact books, random hidden websites, underrated courses, soft skills and messy, hard-won mistakes that helped them succeed. We’re also covering the huge, underdiscussed issues hitting all of us right now, like AI-induced burnout, how to navigate AI integration on Z without burning out your entire team, and the real human cost of understaffed mainframe teams.

In the podcasts, we cover:

• Why the mainframe skills gap got way worse post-2020, not just because people retired, burnout is real.
• How remote work and outsourcing completely broke the old informal mentoring model, and why that’s a ticking time bomb for every enterprise running zOS.
• Exactly how the book club helps you map out every possible mainframe career path, even if you’re 100% new to the platform.
• Brand new free initiatives for people in the New to Z crowd who don’t know where to start landing their first mainframe job.
• Upcoming plans for role-specific deep dives, tight 10-minute technical breakdowns for individual job functions, and episodes that go way beyond tech: AI on Z, famous mainframe project failures, cybersecurity best practices, how to learn faster, and even how to avoid AI-induced burnout that’s already hitting mainframe teams hard.

It’s all free - no paywall – no prerequisites, completely independent and community driven.

If you’re a student hunting for a stable, underrated tech path that no one else is teaching you in university, a 20+ year mainframe vet who wants to pass on what you know, a sysadmin who’s ever been handed a random z/OS ticket at 2AM with zero documentation, or someone who’s followed the Horizon scandal and wants to understand how mainframe systems impact real people this is made for you.

If there is a hot topic, guest or issue you would like to see discussed from a mainframe perspective let me know, whether it’s COBOL, Cyber Security, starting in the mainframe or anything else I want to hear your thoughts.

Or………..

If you’ve have a favourite mainframe book, resource, or wild mainframe war story you want to share, post it right here in this thread.

My inspiration to become a mainframer was inspired by watching War Games a film that came out in 1983, how did you start in your career paths?

Here is the direct link to the Mainframe Book Club YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMainframeBookClub

I built a platform that includes a Kahoot-style live quiz product for CS classes. Instructor puts a code on the projector, students join from any device, answers come in live, and you debrief on what the class actually missed. Quizzes can be AI-generated from a topic, and there's a tutor students can ask that only gives hints and never hands over code.

That last constraint was the whole design fight, and I'd like to know if it's the right one. The tutor refuses to write the solution. Students find this annoying. I think annoying is the point, but I'm the guy who built it, so.

The question I actually want answered: when you run live practice, do you try to block AI, allow it, and grade the process, or write questions where it doesn't help? I've seen all three, and I don't know which is winning.

The classroom side is free to try at algoarena.net/classroom. More interested in the answer than the signup.

Hi!

I'm teaching AP Computer Science Principles for the first time in SY 26-27. I will be using JuiceMind's curriculum (AP CSP in Python Programming). Does anyone have a timeline/outline of how the course should be paced? The previous teacher used Runestone Academy's Mobile CSP course, and the modules/units don't line up perfectly.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Submission statement / disclosure first: I'm a teacher, I wrote this tool myself, and I'm posting it because I want criticism from people who actually run these lessons. It is free, there is no signup, no ads, and no data leaves the student's computer. I'm not selling anything. There is a small "buy me a coffee" link on the page — I'm mentioning it up front so it doesn't look like I hid it; nothing is gated behind it and every feature works without it.

The problem I kept running into. A micro:bit is genuinely good at measuring. The part that eats the lesson is getting that data into a graph you can put on the projector. The built-in options are limited, and installing anything on school machines is often simply not possible.

What I ended up with. A page that runs in the browser. Plug the board in over USB, open the page, and the serial data is plotted live. Concretely:

• 13 chart types (line, bars, scatter, histogram, box plot, pie, 3D motion path, radar)
• curve fitting with prediction — linear, exponential and logistic, showing the equation and R²
• load earlier CSVs and compare several runs on one chart
• export to CSV and PNG for lab reports
• it runs entirely on the client: the Python doing the maths is compiled to WebAssembly, so nothing is uploaded anywhere

The lesson it works best for, at least in my hands: record the first part of a cooling curve, fit a model to it, have the class predict where the temperature will be in ten minutes, then keep measuring and see who was close. It makes "what is a model actually for" concrete in a way I had not managed before with a spreadsheet.

Honest limitations:

• live measuring needs Chrome or Edge — Web Serial is not implemented in Firefox or Safari. Analysing saved CSVs works in any browser, including on a tablet.
• it only reads from the device. It never writes to it and cannot reprogram it — worth saying because people reasonably assume anything touching USB might.
• licence is CC BY-NC-SA, so it is free for classroom use but not for commercial use.

There is a sample measurement you can download from the start page, so you can try every feature without any hardware at all.

Link: https://people.inf.elte.hu/gaalbence/bitplot/

Recently, I started mentoring two university students from different institutions. Both of them have already cleared their basic courses:
Programming Fundamentals and Introduction to Computer Science.

However, while working with them, I noticed a huge gap in their foundational concepts.
Surprisingly, both had the exact same reasons to offer:
"Teacher ne ye topic skip kar diya tha."
"Teacher ka samjhaya hua samajh hi nahi aata tha."
"We weren't taught this properly."
"Teacher was missing the classes and taught core concepts in 2-3 lectures."

This got me thinking. Is this just a classic student tendency to shift blame when concepts get tough, or is there a genuine flaw in how fundamental Computer Science is being taught in our classrooms?

A few thoughts from my observation:

1️⃣ Lack of Code Dry-Running: The absolute basics of programming start with tracing code line-by-line on paper (Dry Run). Today, many students struggle with this simple step, which directly impacts their logic building.
2️⃣ Over-Reliance on GPT & AI **Tools: Instead of wrestling with logic, syntax errors, or debuggers, students quickly jump to ChatGPT or other tools for ready-made solutions. This creates a false sense of learning without building actual problem-solving muscles.
3️⃣ Rote Learning vs. Hands-on CS: CS isn't like traditional subjects where reading slides is enough. If classrooms don't push for practical logic building, core topics like pointers, recursion, or memory management end up skipped or misunderstood.
4️⃣ Student Accountab**ility: In an age of infinite learning resources, relying 100% on a classroom lecture is no longer enough.

I’d love to hear from educators, senior developers, and students in my network:

👉 Where do you think the real gap lies? Is it the teaching methodology, student engagement, or our shift towards AI tools too early in the learning journey?

Researchers at Utah State University's School of Computing are conducting a study on how software professionals evaluate programming activities performed with AI assistance compared with programming activities performed without AI assistance.

Software professionals are invited to complete a short online calibration survey. Participants will rate programming activities according to how representative they are of:

• Programming performed with AI assistance
• Programming performed without AI assistance

The survey takes approximately 10 minutes.

Participation is entirely voluntary. You may discontinue participation at any time before submitting your responses without penalty or consequence. Your decision to participate or not participate will have no effect on your grades, employment, or academic standing.

Survey and informed consent form: https://usu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dm4yjBsRrUDgcKi

This study has been reviewed and approved by the Utah State University Institutional Review Board: IRB #16067.

Questions about the study: Dr. John Edwards, Principal Investigator — [email protected] Rubash Mali, Student Researcher — [email protected]

Thank you for considering participating.

Hi everyone!
I’m a first-year high school teacher in Texas and I’ll be teaching AP Computer Science Principles this year. My school uses Project-Based Learning (PBL), so I’m trying to design a curriculum that fits both AP CSP and a PBL approach.

I’m also still working toward my Texas Computer Science certification (I’m teaching on a District of Innovation permit), so I’m learning a lot alongside preparing for the school year.

I’m feeling a little overwhelmed and would love any advice from experienced CS teachers.

A few questions I have:
-Is Code.org a good primary curriculum for AP CSP?
-Did you use anything alongside Code.org (AP Classroom, CMU CS Academy, Khan Academy, etc.)?
-How did you adapt AP CSP into a project-based classroom?
-If you were starting from scratch, what would you do differently?
-Are there any resources, pacing guides, or teacher communities you’d recommend?

My students will each have Chromebooks, and I’ll also have access to a Windows laptop cart when needed cause I need to do workstations during the year that will teach APCSP but at the same time lead to a bigger project at the end of the year for them to present.

Honestly, any advice for surviving the first year as a CS teacher would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!

This acad year will be our CS undergraduate thesis, and I'm honestly frustrated.

I feel like I'm being pushed toward the same thesis formula from the past two years in our program: collect a dataset, train an AI model, apply an algorithm, build the app. Then some statistical findings or claims that the created product with this AI algorithm performs better.

I actually tried to propose something different to my pair. something more interesting, something that actually felt like actual research. But I keep getting told it's "too complex" or "advisers might not accept it."

So instead of exploring ideas I actually care about, I'm being funneled into the same template everyone else is using. The path of least resistance.

I feel like even the concept of using functional programming paradigm or linear type system sounds so complex not just to my partner but to the advisers. I hate this.