acbart

Asimov predicted "Robopsychology".

I had similar thoughts recently, and wrote a somewhat related blog post: https://acbart.github.io/2026/08/23/limited-environments/

There's a live music concert for Chrono Trigger playing right now. That game had one of the best soundtracks of all time.

Online exams are a pointless waste of time and invasion of privacy, designed to make money without measuring anything. It encourages good people to cheat. If you don't have in-person proctored exams, you are wasting your time.

The closest I ever saw this working was a site called OhYay. It really felt like spaces you could move around in. It wasn't the same as IRL, but it was about as close as I think you could get. Sadly, the company shut down before they could become profitable.

The best talks at a conference are the ones in the hallway.

I mean, did you read the linked article?

Regarding the changes to your grading weights: https://acbart.github.io/2026/04/19/proctored-grades/

Sounds like 50/50 for the distribution? That means you are okay with a student getting a 40% across all your quizzes and then passing the class with a C-?

I'd be interested in seeing the "slop" version for comparison.

Some of the permissions problems related to window.showDirectoryPicker have been frustrating. I'm developing a client-side Python web framework, and during development I need to mount the library locally; I hand off the directory to Pyodide using this API. But that doesn't work in VSCode's internal browser, apparently because the API just simply isn't able to be approved.

Yep, I'm starting to hear this more and more. Matches my local data. It's a very massive and visible shift in DFW rates.

The fact that you are talking about Dan Garcia, a huge figure in computing education research and an excellent teacher, and the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum makes this hilarious. You should look up some details about both.

You'd be amazed at how many students we know are obviously cheating because the logs reveal that they copy pasted a long, complete answer within seconds of opening a problem for the first time, full of sophisticated code constructs that we didn't teach them, and lot's of nicely formatted comments. Sometimes they even copy/paste the entire GPT output and then format it down.

In the spring, but not the fall?

It's an incredible curriculum. I have a lot of fond memories myself. I frequently wonder nowadays if it isn't the right approach to force students to stop and think a bit more about "Computer Science" and not just "Programming" in an introductory context.

It's crazy to me that people think of Python as dynamically typed by default. Strong static typing has been an option in Python for years now, and it should just be the default.

Or "Age of Ultron".

> Due to broader product alignment decisions at Microsoft, the Visual Studio Code for Education product roadmap will be coming to an end.

Also for deadlines and social accountability. There's a reason why there was a lot less learning during the pandemic. The simple fact that most online learning advocates don't want to acknowledge is that humans learn better from other humans in person. On average, of course.

Last time I dove into its research, I found that Math Blaster had no impact on student learning.

The witness was fine, but The Looker was much better.

Tunic is such an incredible experience. If you ever enjoyed the original Zelda and its manual, you simply must play tunic. It captures something incredible. And it has some amazing twists.

Where are you seeing CS classes with increasing enrollment? Everyone I know is saying they're seeing smaller classes. Maybe some upper division from the last swell, but we're all definitely declining this year and last year, from what I'm seeing.

I agree, I think many people who rail against exams underestimate how important memory is to more complicated skills. How can you debug a complex application if you have to keep looking up every operator and keyword in the language you're using? It'd be like trying to interpret poetry in a foreign language but you have to look up every single noun. I'm not saying people can't do it, but it's tedious, slow, and you probably wouldn't think of them as a "professional worth paying for their service". Some amount of memorization is key.

Exams happen all the time in real life. Or rather, situations where you can't just look up fundamental knowledge. Job interviews, presentations, even mundane work tasks - all these require you to know the basics quickly "The basics" are relative, of course, but I often point out to my students: "you don't care if your doctor needs to look up the specific interactions of your various meds. You do care if you see them googling 'what is an appendix'." Proctored, in-person exams are the only reliable mechanism we have for ascertaining if a specific individual has mastered key fundamentals and can answer relevant questions about them in a relatively timely fashion. Everything else is details and thresholds - how fast do you need to be able to recall, how deep, what details are fundamental. From there, I think it's fine to hate poorly made exams, and it's a given that many folks making exams have no idea what they're doing (or don't have the resources to do it right). But the premise of an exam is not completely divorced from reality.

So at 50%, someone who uses AI to get 100% of the homework grade will earn a D (sometimes passing) if they can get at least a 20% on your quizzes, and a C (always passing) if they get at least a 40%. Did you make your exam so difficult that students who truly didn't learn the material earn less than 20-40%? Because if it was, say, multiple choice questions with four possible answers, then you can expect them to earn at least 25% just by chance.

It makes it easier to make sure it runs right. Code that is easier to make sure is quality code. Code that is hard to make sure is not quality code.

Yes, exactly. I'm having a frustrating time reminding senior teachers of this, people with authority who should really know better. There seems to be some delusion that this technology will somehow change how people learn in a fundamental way.