Category: Uncategorized

The winners of a free copy of “How to Teach Computer Science” are:

• Twitter user @MrsFKhalifa
• Twitter user @MsRobinson2021
• Facebook user Barry-John Silver

Please direct message/private message me on Twitter or Facebook or email alanjharrison@bcs.org with your address to claim your book!

If you were unsuccessful this time, make sure you follow me on Twitter for future promotions, or buy a copy now for under £15! If you won, consider helping me out with a coffee. Thanks!

It’s coming… that time we all catch up with family and friends, have a well-earned break, and put our feet up with a brew and a book. That book could be on me, if you enter my prize draw for a copy of “How to Teach Computer Science” Simply reblog this blog, RT my tweet here, or Like this post on Facebook to enter the prize draw. Three winners will get a copy in the post after the competition closes at Noon on Sunday 24th July. Thank you for spreading the word!

BREAKING NEWS: How to LEARN computer science, the ambitious student’s guide to studying computer science, will be out this September!

The title says it all, please for the love of children, turn off password expiry on your students’ accounts. Here’s why…

I was an Information Security (Infosec) consultant before I was a teacher. The prevailing wisdom up in the 20th century was that passwords should expire regularly, so that any compromised password quickly became useless. The password-thief would lose access once the rightful owner changed their password. This made sense at the time, most users had only one or at most a handful of passwords. They could cope with changing them once a quarter or so. That was then.

Forward to 2022 and we all have dozens, even hundreds of passwords. If they all expired quarterly, not a day would go by without one changing. But they don’t. We have access to password keepers, and most browsers offer to save passwords in an encrypted database. Our sensitive data is kept behind two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA) processes. We don’t have to remember a password that changes every 90 days or less. So why do it to the pupils?

I teach Year 7 upward, that’s aged 11 plus. Some of the pupils I teach arrive in with a reading age of 8 or less. My colleagues in upper primary who begin teaching pupils to use Office or Google Docs are teaching pupils with a reading age of 5 or 6. This is before we consider SEND needs such as visual impairment, motor control issues and ADHD to name but a few that are relevant here. So you can imagine the challenges they face. When password expiry came around, the conversations often went like this:

• Ah, your password has expired. Right let me help…<sigh>
• In those two boxes you have to type a new password.
• No it can’t be the old one again. Oh, you already tried that? Right well now you have to type in your old password again.
• No, I know I said you needed to type a new password but that comes next, first you need to type your old one in again, or it won’t let you type the new one.
• Now, the new password needs to be at least 8 characters long, include a capital and a number, and be different to all your old ones.
• If didn’t work again? Did you follow the rules? Ah, I see you didn’t use a capital, you need to press Shift for that, remember?
• Right, maybe you didn’t type it exactly the same in both boxes.
• No you’ll have to type your old password correctly again to have another attempt at choosing a new one.
• OK so we’re ready to choose a new password again, can you remember the rules?
• No those two passwords are not the same length, I can see from the length of the asterisk strings. Can you go back and do it again?
• Oops, you hit Enter and it’s asking for old password again. Just do that first then try to get the new password the same twice this time.
• Right two passwords the same length, are you sure they are the same?
• Oh dear it’s still rejecting the new password. Did I mention it cannot include your name? You included your name? We can’t do that.
• Yes, you need to type your old password again to try again.
• One capital, at least eight characters, and a number.
• Yes, they look the same length, are we ready to go?
• Great job! you changed your password. Now write a hint in your planner, something to remind you what the password was, but not the whole thing, OK?
• <writes hint>
• <1 week later>
• You can’t remember your password? Does the hint not help? OK then I’ll reset it. You’ll need to choose a new one, it will need to be at least 8 characters long, include a capital and a number, and be different to all your old ones….

repeat for at least half of every Year 7 class for half of the year and more than a handful of students every week, back when passwords expired in my school. But that was then…

I successfully used my prior experience as an Infosec (Cybersecurity) consultant to persuade my IT team to turn off password expiry. Because it’s not necessary on student accounts, and strongly discouraged on staff accounts too. Who says? The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). In an advisory article entitled “Password policy: updating your approach”, the UK government’s dedicated Cybersecurity unit wrote this:

“Forcing password expiry carries no real benefits because:

• the user is likely to choose new passwords that are only minor variations of the old
• stolen passwords are generally exploited immediately
• resetting the password gives you no information about whether a compromise has occurred
• an attacker with access to the account will probably also receive the request to reset the password
• if compromised via insecure storage, the attacker will be able to find the new password in the same place”

I could add other reasons to the above, regular password expiry causes users to write down their passwords, or just forget them. Now they no longer expire I don’t have the torturous “password expired” lessons and pupils no longer use “I forgot my password” as an excuse for missed homework. I gave them some skills to choose a strong, memorable password and introduced detentions for forgotten passwords after a while, as explained on this blog post. And nothing terrible has happened.

Please. Stop expiring your passwords.

My book “How to Teach Computer Science” is available for just £15 or less, see httcs.online for details. Tweet me @mraharrisoncs with comments.

I work at this youth club where the children turn phones off and put them away at the start of the club session, and don’t turn them back on again until they leave. I love how this means they are present, engaging with others: their peers and the club leaders, for the duration of the session.

“It’s a duck, obviously!” I’m looking over the shoulder of a 14 year old girl. There are a group of them sitting around a picnic table. They are playing Pictionary, without the board game. Just choosing things to draw for others to guess, on an A4 sketch pad.

There is a group of mostly boys playing basketball and another group playing football. I go in goal for a minute. I make a show of diving but I’m rubbish. I shoot a basket. It drops short of the hoop. I’m rubbish at that too but the boys don’t mind: “good job you’re good at computers, Sir!” one of them jokes.

In a moment we will go inside and I’ll teach two dozen of them to write computer programs. They will find it easier to concentrate on my instruction because they don’t have the distraction of pinging mobiles: the collected might of YouTube and TikTok, with their designed-in, completely a feature-not-a-bug, industrial strength addictive charms.

By the time they get their phones out again they will have spent six hours off them. They’ve had a long break from their social media, free of the need to check “Likes” and get dopamine hits from repeated sub-15-second trending videos. UK’s Mind charity recommends finding a balance between online and offline life for the benefit of mental health. The kids that come to this youth club get 30 hours per week offline, giving them time for really positive, face-to-face interactions with their peers and teachers.

Oops, the cat is out of the bag. Of course I’m not a youth club worker, I am a teacher. The youth club is my school. But the rest is true, the game of Pictionary and the basketball and football all happened, and is typical fare at break and lunch.

So. Does your school give your kids a solid 6-hour phone break every day? If not, why not?

How to LEARN Computer Science is now in copy-editing. This means it will be ready for the new academic year, YAY, go me! I have taken all the good stuff from the first book (How to Teach Computer Science, available here) that is relevant to an audience of GCSE students themselves, and added lots of new content.

Instead of pedagogy, the book contains a collection of solid study skills I have had success with over the years. You can see a sneak preview here.

Then the book follows the same format as the original HTTCS book, with one chapter per typical GCSE topic. But again, where HTTCS included pedagogy for effective teaching, htLEARNcs includes lots of bite-sized study advice, with suggested activities linked to the topic.

I have kept the new book as faithful to the old book as possible, so teachers can use HTTCS for their own benefit, while recommending (dare I say buying 🙂 ) htLEARNcs for their students.

Teachers can set a chapter of htLEARNcs for homework, or just one of the activities each week. A few copies in the classroom could be used as “stretch” activity resources, and aspirational parents can buy it for their children.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress towards publication. But it’s great to see this second book coming together! If you haven’t got hold of the first book yet, it’s still just £11.55 on Amazon at time of writing.

“Every human should read this” – first posted on Goodreads. Links below.

Educated by Tara Westover

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book will stay with me for a long time. SPOILERS AHEAD and TW for DOMESTIC ABUSE.

I am a teacher in the UK and was going to open my first Goodreads review in years with something like “every teacher should read this book” because so much is about the power of education to transform a damaged soul. Then it occurred to me that “every parent should read this book” because so much of the book is about (bad) parenting. Then I pondered some more and thought “every lawmaker should read this book” because the Westover children were so badly let down by everyone in authority who had the capacity to help them. Then I realized that despite all the pain and suffering Tara recounts so eloquently, it’s a story of redemption, of recovery from domestic abuse and will therefore be a beacon of hope for anyone undergoing struggle. So after much consideration, my opening statement has become:

Every human should read this.

Did I say there were spoilers? You have been warned. Also this is another trigger warning for references to domestic violence.

I listened to the audio book, in ten hours over a few weeks. The first half of the book recounts Tara’s disturbing childhood as the youngest of seven children of a radical Mormon “survivalist” who believed “the abomination” was coming and spent most evenings terrifying the children with Old Testament verses about the end of the world. The parents denied Tara any schooling or healthcare, forced her to work in the insanely dangerous family junkyard and turned a blind eye to Tara’s brother Shawn’s cruelty and violence. (Later we learn that older sister Audrey had also been a victim of Shawn’s violent bullying, and that when Shawn married a girl ten years his junior, he manipulated and bullied her too).

The house was filthy, Tara had no friends or social life, and few books. Her father refused her requests to go to school and as brother Shawn got older the violence became more serious. Tara’s Father’s reckless attitude to safety extended to driving – they stayed with Grandma in Arizona when the Idaho winter closed in – and twice the deathtrap family car, without seatbelts, crashed on the way back, not once but twice. The first time, brother Luke was forced to drive through the night until he fell asleep at the wheel, crashing into a telegraph pole and causing a brain injury to Tara’s mother, but sickeningly she was not taken to hospital (Tara’s mother was a “herbalist” and they shunned modern medicine, Father claiming it was a “tool of the illuminati”). Tara’s father was driving during the second accident: way too fast on icy roads claiming “I’m not driving faster than the angels can fly!” before pitching the van into a field. The father’s belief in divine protection seemed to absolve him from any responsibility to protect his children, and this would be an infuriating theme throughout the book.

At this point, you’re probably wondering how long ago this happened? Surely this is frontier stuff, 19th century America when it was every family for themselves? No, Tara was born in 1986 in the richest country in the world. That the children were forced to endure such pain and terror in modern times is unconscionable, and it will make your blood boil. But redemption will come in part two, of sorts…

Tara found solace in books. Her kind brother Tyler taught her to read, and she studied voraciously after that. Somehow, having not attended school at all, she passed the entrance exam for Brigham Young University, graduating in 2008. Her tutor recommended her for Cambridge and she gained a Masters and, eventually, against all odds, a PhD in 2014.

The book is expertly written, treading that fine line between recounting sufficient detail of horrific acts that we can understand and empathise, but without so much horror that we are repelled. We hear her thoughts, Tara’s emotional trauma comes across painfully well, and we completely and wholeheartedly empathise with her. We are in her corner for the entire book and feel like cheering when success comes her way.

The book has left its mark on the teacher in me. It’s impossible to go to work and see the children in front of me and not wonder… is there a Tara among you? Is your home life wracked with misery? Do you have a protector at home, or an abuser?

Before reading this book I already believed in the power of education to change lives, it’s why I am a teacher after all. But I would not have believed, if you had told me, that someone could live seventeen years without any formal education, and then gain a doctorate within ten years. Let alone that someone be the victim of seventeen years of child neglect and physical and emotional abuse.

It is on this that I must dwell a moment because I should not have had to write that last sentence. I would like to think that here in the UK our systems are tighter, that “homeschooling” means just that, we allow precious little of it in the first place, and we monitor homeschooled children closely. Our social services, stretched though they are, often (but don’t always) pick up child neglect. But we must never take this for granted, another Tara is possible anywhere if we all look away, if we trust a “godly” father and don’t listen to the child.

Tara talks passionately in the book about moral philosophers, Hume and Mill and it’s fabulous to sit alongside her as she discovers feminism for the first time aged seventeen, and is enraptured with Wollstonecraft and Greer. We feel her deep shame as she finds out for the first time in the college library why the lecture theatre had gone deathly, glaringly silent, as she earnestly asked in class, “Sir what’s this word here ‘holocaust’?”

Tara writes “Educated” like a PhD of moral philosophy, she examines her innermost feelings and philosophises about them, she analyses her struggle for emotional stability through the lens of first wave feminism and the works of John Stuart Mill. That she eventually has to disown her family is sadly inevitable, especially as they come to Harvard (where Tara was a visiting fellow between first degree and Masters) to offer “a priests blessing” to “save Tara from Satan” (which is really a demand that Tara stops telling the truth about her violent brother). I am aware the family have disputed Tara’s account, but crucially not the part about Shawn’s cruelty and violence.

The book is maddening and uplifting by turns. It’s not an easy read by any means. But it was well worth it. Hopefully it’s given Idahoans pause: that seven children living amongst them could be so neglected and abused. It’s given me fresh desire to be a good teacher, a powerful advocate for my students, and a good father. And a little part of me feels like somehow, travelling this highway of heartache and hope in lockstep with Tara, I gained inspiration, insight, and a new friend.



View all my reviews

“What is Heath, Sir? That question really threw us”

They were referring to this question, from an Edexcel past paper:

I hadn’t expected that challenge. I realised that not one of the class in front of me would have met a “Heath”. I later looked at all the names used in the past paper questions I had been setting: William, Julie, Kerry, Xander, Hamish, Fiona, Kirstie, Byron, Grahame, Marian, Victoria, Johnny (there’s always a Johnny).

I looked at the register: Yahya, Bilal, Naziba, Tahira, Adedeji, Mohamed, Manas, Caoimhe, Abdullah, Chandan, James, Sufyan, Nathan, Harry, Jamiha, Aseel, Isla, Zoya*

I had a think about this. I read some stuff on the importance of representation and cultural relevance. And I changed my mocks and test papers to include names from all the cultures of the children in front of me. It’s a small step but the right thing to do.

More importantly perhaps the exam boards have started doing the same. OCR’s recent (since 2020) papers have included the names Hope, Daniel and Rob but also Ali, Naomi, Iqbal and Amir.

That’s why I was a little frustrated to read a post on Facebook a few months ago that read “I’ve made this exam paper, with all the ‘politically correct’ names changed to Star Wars characters!” I wonder if that teacher had an Ali or a Naomi in his class, and what joy they might have been denied, not seeing their own name (or a name popular in their culture) in the materials in front of them.

It’s fine to try to add a little fun to proceedings and jump on the kids’ current interests, but please don’t do it at the expense of representation. Also I appreciate this might seem trivial, but every little counts as we try to make our curriculum more inclusive.

* this is a fictional register using students first names I have once taught, not a current register of any class, but it is representative of a typical class in my school.

Update – scroll down for the slides I presented at these sessions. If you enjoy this content why not buy me a coffee?

I was delighted to present a couple of sessions at this event alongside a wealth of talent, including…

• Marc White, Ofsted National Computing Lead
• Sue Sentance, Raspberry Pi Foundation
• Dr Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel, The Learning Scientists
• William Lau
• Isaac Computing
• Raspberry Pi
• CAS
• BT
• Ellie Narewska, Guardian
• Code Club
• STEM Ambassadors
• Quafaro, Cyber security
• The Centre for Computing History
• The National Centre for Computing Education plus lots more

See the brochure here, and book here. My two sessions are as follows (scroll past the ad which helps me maintain this blog!):

• Computing Pedagogy: Hinterland, Misconceptions and Semantic Waves – powerful tools for progress. How reading around the subject can improve your delivery, how “Semantic Waves” improve student understanding, and how misconception-aware teaching gets great results. I explore these pedagogical tools with a focus on how they can be used to great effect in GCSE Computer Science teaching. – Slides now available here and recording below:

• Networks and System Security for GCSE success. A detailed look at the GCSE Networks and System Security specification and how to teach it. Demystifying client-server and P2P models, network protocols, security threats and countermeasures, helping you confidently teach these topics. – Slides now available here and recording below.

Enjoy, and remember to tip me a couple of quid for a Cappucino with an extra shot… 🙂