Tootfinder

@… Would love to see this integrate with GitHub more, particularly the classroom functionality.
I’ve spent a good few hours on and off over the years helping one of our local CompSci teachers with all of the work around “How do I go from an exercise I want students to complete, to an actual assignment in GH Classroom, a template repo, and a GH Action pip…

Fun educational psychology experiment idea if anyone wants to run it by an IRB and get a paper published:
Get an entire compsci 1 class to take the RAADS-R. Then measure how easily/quickly they understood call/return stack semantics when the concept was first introduced (based on quiz/homework score, self reported "this makes sense" level, or something else).
And scatter plot the two against each other. Do you get two neat clusters?

in the recent "Illusion of Thinking" paper, they use puzzles like Towers of Hanoi and show that an LLM has trouble doing n=8 Hanoi correctly, even when told an algorithm to solve it.
every compsci-adjacent person cites the recursive algorithm, because it's a cute example of recursion. but there's a very simple non-recursive algorithm for any size Hanoi:
- move the smallest disk clockwise.
- move the only other disk that can move.
- repeat.
most hu…

R.I.P. Margaret Ann Boden.
#margaretboden #cogsci #compsci #philosophy