Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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Please welcome your pro tem moderators!
First off, thanks to everyone who participated at the unofficial moderator nominations meta post!
Throughout the beta, we need members from this site whose focus is to engage the community, both in ...
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5answers
497 views
Can this site succeed? — encouraging more users and questions
What can we do to encourage more users to ask more questions? There are so many great ones sitting in our proposal waiting to be asked. The definition phase brought up some great topics that could be ...
14
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0answers
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What does a new member need to know on this site?
As a newcomer here, not knowing the culture, it is easy to make some mistakes. Due to the complexity of the site it is also sometimes difficult to find the information you need when you need it. This "...
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5answers
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Suitable age range tags
What is the best way of tagging questions to identify the combination of experience level and age range which a question is focused on? Ideally in a way which will be internationally relevant?
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8answers
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Let's name our main room!
When our site was created, we were given a main chat room. Just like all the other sites, we were given the default name, which is the same name as our site name: "Computer Science Educators".
On ...
11
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2answers
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Frame-Challenging Questions on CSEducators
I recently posted a frame-challenging answer to a question, and received an astute comment that I had not actually answered OP's question.
"Nay, say I!" I cried out unto the heavens. "...
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2answers
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Language A v. Language B (v. Language C…)
We've now had two questions address this issue:
What can Snap! do that Scratch cannot?
Scheme vs Haskell for introducing functional programming
I can see further questions coming down the line in ...
10
votes
2answers
108 views
Site promotion needs to be, well, promoted
So, I think we missed an opportunity. Wouldn't this have been a good place to promote the site (I look for something that says we can't or cannot, so I have no idea whether it would have been allowed ...
10
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2answers
199 views
Topic Challenges
We need more questions
It's been pointed out by numerous people on many occasions that we need more questions. The graph of questions per week over time has remained almost flat, but despite that, ...
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26answers
952 views
The Question Sandbox
This question should serve as a sandbox for in-progress questions. Any question submitted here will automagically be shown in the Guidance Office. We need this space because it's hard to actually work ...
9
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3answers
81 views
Questions simply seeking ideas
What kind of game (in Scratch) would require use of a list?
It is clearly too broad, but finding great examples is also entirely central to what we do as educators. How could a question like this be ...
9
votes
2answers
75 views
Should language tags exist?
For tagging, would it be useful to have language tags?
My perspective would be that we should have an introductoryprogramming tag (which we do) and also have general field tags where it's beneficial, ...
9
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0answers
71 views
Site scope thoughts
As we continue through our public beta phase, site definition remains rather important. The decisions made in the next few weeks will guide the site for a long time to come. They will also help us ...
8
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3answers
288 views
Creating Community Ads
I've created this post to track our community ads as they appear on other sites. The answers can be used for proposing new designs, the highest voted one will go on other sites (manually edited in ...
8
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4answers
231 views
Long Form writing for CS Educators. Is a Blog possible?
I have just written a long meta post that I'm told doesn't really belong here. I agree, but think something like it belongs somewhere if we are to really service educators.
What doesn't work.
Neither ...
8
votes
3answers
87 views
The list-nature of [lesson-ideas]
This has been bothering me for quite a long time, but I've had some trouble articulating it. We have already had quite a lot of discussion about list questions, and have historically been fairly ...
8
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0answers
56 views
Teachers: share your knowledge
Occasionally, there are crazy question-answer ratios because of users who mostly answer questions - these people obviously have tons of knowledge they can share. With this in mind, since we want to ...
8
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0answers
51 views
Retagging: Coding style? Conventions? Practices?
Tag proposal number 2:
Merge code-style and coding-conventions into coding-style
Upvote if you agree, downvote if you disagree, or answer if there are additional considerations.
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6answers
225 views
What are common terms used in education in different countries?
There are regional/national differences in the use of some words, which can cause confusion. In the US, a 'course' is a single graded item on a transcript, it could be a week long or a term / semester....
7
votes
2answers
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Rename OOP tag?
We currently have a tag for object-oriented-paradigm. Since OOP is conventionally defined as "object-oriented programming" (and is a programming paradigm), should the tag reflect as much? Would it ...
7
votes
2answers
94 views
Objectivity and this site
This site, as an education site with educators, is likely to end up soliciting many questions that come down to simple advice. (namely What language should be first used to introduce coding?)
How ...
7
votes
4answers
122 views
Introducing… the [introductory-programming] tag cleanup!
The idea of teaching programming to beginners in pretty simple. But it's the simplest ideas that are most heavily abused. In that spirit, I think we need to monitor the most used tag on the site: ...
7
votes
2answers
111 views
Topic Challenge 1 Winner and Challenge 2 Voting!
The winner of our first question challenge, The Review Spew, was ItamarG3's question, the Order of Subjects in Beginner's Curriculum. And the winning answer was iFrame for The order of subjects in ...
7
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2answers
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Topic Challenges III: Return of the Topic
Well, it's been a while.
To our new(-er) users, welcome to Topic Challenges. To our old(-er) users, welcome back.
In the spirit of improving the site, its questions and the amount of fun and ...
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1answer
47 views
Retagging: Getting the Group Together
Tag proposal number 3:
Change group-assignment to group-work
Upvote if you agree, downvote if you disagree, or answer if there are additional considerations.
7
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2answers
539 views
Topic Challenge #02: Being Selfish
(I'd like to give a special thanks to ItamarG3 for his help writing up this challenge. Please give him a round of applause, everyone!)
"In case of emergency, air masks will drop from the ceiling. ...
7
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0answers
96 views
Smelly and Pingable people
We have a bot that helps you ping people in the classroom.
The command !!/help will provide the following:
...
6
votes
4answers
372 views
Teaching (parents) with no intention to do programming themselves
This time, we have this question. I'll save you the trouble of clicking the link and tell you that the question is about teaching parents what code is.
The question is not like others we have had ...
6
votes
3answers
82 views
Are resource requests on-topic?
On the main StackOverflow site, the on-topic help states:
Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack ...
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votes
5answers
108 views
Site scope refinement: internet safety
I more or less accept this question is off topic:
https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/461/teach-children-living-in-the-online-society
In the question's defense:
I asked about websites, ...
6
votes
3answers
70 views
How We Use Twitter
As some of you may be aware, we started a Twitter account to promote the site this past weekend: @cs_educators. I am currently managing it, but I would love your input on how we use it: I want it to ...
6
votes
4answers
83 views
Summer is coming
Here is a (distilled) conversation largely between @SeanHoulihane and I on the chat today:
Sean Houlihane: @thesecretmaster Lots of questions is to be expected in the first few days - several coming ...
6
votes
2answers
119 views
Users shouldn't be told they're asking the wrong question
One of the things people hate about Stack Overflow is that when they ask a question of the form "How do I do X in Y?", they get answers of the form "You shouldn't do X" or "...
6
votes
4answers
107 views
What should we do about answers in the comments?
"Answer in comments": A comment which is a very short attempt to answer the question or solve the problem.
Answers in comments are a very common phenomenon on this site. Some questions have one while ...
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votes
3answers
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Meta-tagging based on age/grade/course/ability
Notice: Now that we've chosen a proposal, we are discussing implementation as a part of this meta question. Please have any further discussions there.
Way back in the early days of our site (well, a ...
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2answers
80 views
How should we treat list questions?
Questions have been voted down, put on hold, or closed for being "list questions" without an objective answer. I think this is a problem, for a few reasons:
The rule is inconsistently applied. This ...
6
votes
1answer
51 views
Questions to collect interdisciplinary content?
Are these sort of questions useful? If so, what should be a couple of ways we pilot them to gauge what should be tweaked in the wording or age-domain boundaries? Are labels and a different type of ...
6
votes
1answer
48 views
We need a name for our secondary chat room
Now that we have a new name for our primary chat room, The Classroom, we need a name for the permanent chat room we have for helping users refine questions.
This is where we can direct users, ...
6
votes
2answers
94 views
Implementing education-level based tagging
This is a continuation of the discussion on this question. At the time of this writing, this answer was highest voted, and so the implementation of it will be discussed here.
For reference, here is ...
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5answers
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Topic Challenge #2 Winner and Challenge 3 Voting!
Our challenge of Topic Challenge #02: Being Selfish has received 2 entries:
Strategies for self-learners to transition into working on larger projects - 177 points!
Attempting to prevent learning of ...
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2answers
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Topic Challenge #01: the Review Spew
“The time has come,” the Meta said,
“To speak of many things;
Of Challenges, of brand new tags
Of S.E. shirts as bling.
And why some lesson didn’t work
And making worksheets zing.”
&...
6
votes
1answer
39 views
Voting on questions
I have noticed that we have a few questions with more answers than up votes.
Seems to me that if the question is good enough to take the time to write an answer, that it's probably also good enough ...
6
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0answers
62 views
How to write Tag Wikis
Tags are keywords or labels that categorize and group your question with other, similar questions.
Tags make it easier to filter questions, and to attract experts in the field related to your ...
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votes
3answers
79 views
Should we invite book reviews in Q&A?
Would it make sense to make book reviews on topic? I've read some books of interest to the CS educator community but don't know anywhere good to share my thoughts on them. The SIGCSE publication ...
5
votes
1answer
75 views
Making the help center more helpful
We previously discussed the possibility of updating the help center here. Since we can do it, and we have mods who will do it, what do we want to put in there?
When drafting new sections, feel free ...
5
votes
2answers
67 views
Marketing and publicizing CSE
In light of Robert's recent comment, we need outreach. I just wanted to collect a group of targets. I'm aware of
http://reddit.com/r/compsci
http://reddit.com/r/CSEducation
https://edu.google.com/...
5
votes
2answers
48 views
What is the [student-motivation] for real [engagement]?
I realize that getting the students motivated to learn the subject is often a problem. Even more so when sections of the class can become dry. Students who rapidly grasp some of the concepts can be ...
5
votes
1answer
63 views
Are questions about self-learning on-topic?
Are questions about self-learning on-topic?
They are on-topic on Mathematics Educators to some extend. Maybe the two discussions on their meta site might be of use. I also found a discussion on Area ...
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2answers
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Area 51 Statistics
Let's go through this from best to worst:
100% answered - excellent: Need I say more? We've answered every question.
Around 4.2 answers a question - excellent. So we're kind of rocking the answers.
...
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1answer
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Help center might need a few additions
Now that we're in public beta, it might be a good time to think about expanding parts of the help center. For example the what's on topic page isn't as helpful to new users as it can be.
Additionally, ...
