$500K NSF Grant Boosted Girls' CS Participation At Obama Daughters' $37K/Yr HS 187
theodp writes: On Friday, a paper entitled Creative Computation in High School will be presented at SIGCSE '16. "In this paper," explain the paper's authors, "we describe the success of bringing Creative Computation via Processing into two very different high schools...providing a catalyst for significant increases in total enrollment as well as female participation in high school computer science." One of the two schools that participated in the National Science Foundation-supported project — see NSF awards 1323305 & 1323463 for Creative Computation in the Context of Art and Visual Media — was Sidwell Friends School, which a 2013 SMU news release on the three-year, $500K NSF grant noted was best known as the school attended by President Obama's daughters. Interestingly, in a late-2014 interview, the President lamented that his daughters hadn't taken to coding the way he'd like, adding that "part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way." Hey, nothing that a $4B 'Computer Science For All' K-12 Program can't fix, right?
Computer programming is not computer science (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do they call it that?
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Re:Computer programming is not computer science (Score:5, Interesting)
Computer science is the study of software at a broad level, including software design methodologies (practical CS) and problem complexity (theoretical CS). The first is science (a social science, specifically), because you can experiment with different methodologies, see how they perform, and draw conclusions. The second is more of a theoretical science because you're studying the way computers behave and modeling real-world systems in simplified terms and hopefully verifying how those models relate to real-world behavior, though the latter part is often ignored by theoreticians.
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Actually, there is NOT a lot of science in computing studies outside of the guts of hardware. Science is about modelling the physical world, but computers run virtual worlds (OS's, programming environments, database models), and that is where most students will spend their time.
If you are doing "science" on a virtual world, you're really doing math: proving things about a model, NOT about the actual world. Science is about modelling and predicting the real world, while math is about modelling and predicting
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It's an important skill to have as a programmer, too. Too many people skip important phases (like the measuring phase, saying, "oh, we'll just replace this algorithm, it'll be faster." In reality, if yo
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Further, a sufficiently smart compiler could perhaps optimize a bubble sort to be as fast as the more commonly-used algorithms such to say bubble sort is "objectively slower" than the usual algorithms is probably either wrong, contentious, or very complicated to fully prove.
It's wrong. A bubble sort is typically faster when N < ~10
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RunningTime = c*N*N
Where 'c' is the amount of time it takes to run through one internal loop.
In comparison, for example, with merge sort, we have:
RunningTime = d*N*lg(N)
So, once N gets
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As mentioned elsewhere, a sophisticated optimizing compiler may find shortcuts.
It doesn't matter. The compiler can reduce c, but it's still going to be an N^2 algorithm.
Whether bubble sort could be automatically parallelized is an interesting question, but that's a question for further research, and if it can, we can include it into the model.
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I'm asking for proof of speed, not proof of classification.
The classification tells you how fast it's going to go. Again, we have this equation for the running time of bubble sort:
RunningTime = c*N*N
The comp
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So if you can divide the sort among five cores, you'll get the task done in ~1/5 the time.
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Are you saying for all possible chip designs and all possible compiler designs, bubble sort will ALWAYS be slower than merge sort (for non-trivial sort sets of relatively random keys)?
Yes, as long as it's the type of computer that follows a sequence of steps (as opposed to some kind of weird slime computer [discovery.com] that is magic). Although if it doesn't follow a sequence of steps, it's not bubble-sort anymore.
If so, can you provide the proof?
Yes, the proof involves counting the number of steps required to complete each algorithm.
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The slime machine might be interesting, but (since it's defined as magical) doesn't exi
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Are you saying for all possible chip designs and all possible compiler designs, bubble sort will ALWAYS be slower than merge sort (for non-trivial sort sets of relatively random keys)?
Yes, as long as it's the type of computer that follows a sequence of steps (as opposed to some kind of weird slime computer [discovery.com] that is magic). Although if it doesn't follow a sequence of steps, it's not bubble-sort anymore.
If so, can you provide the proof?
Yes, the proof involves counting the number of steps required to complete each algorithm.
It depends on the efficiency of the computational steps available to you. The classic example is the spaghetti sort, which is O(n). Hang each bit of spaghetti from a pole. Repeat until pole empty [pick the longest length of spaghetti]. This presumes that [pick the longest length of spaghetti] is an O(1) operation, which it is in normal human experience. Logical architecture matters.
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Your proof would have to cover "all possible" compilers/chips/computing-hardware to be thorough or relevant here.
It can cover all known possible computing hardware, or even theoretically possible hardware, and over time investigate to see if there are other possibilities.
We don't have to know everything for computer science to be a science. In fact, if we did know everything, there would be nothing left to investigate.
So therefore computer science is a science.
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"known...hardware", yes.
No, not just known hardware. Any imagined hardware. If you can dream of a hardware that is not magic, then we can prove it's not faster.
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Are you saying any imagined hardware would fit the mentioned speed profile, or is merely "testable"?
It would fit the mentioned speed profile.
Also, whether 'most' students would be doing the testing or not is kind of irrelevant......most biology students don't grow up to be biologists. Research is something for PhDs, both in CS and biology.
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That's just implementation details. We're talking about formal models of abstract spaghetti here.
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Computer science in it's simplest terms is the applied study of the digitising of an analogue world and that it implies ie converting a 'O' into a series of joined straight lines, the more lines the greater the detail. The art of digitally simulating a real world. So software, hardware, digital mathematics, digital physics, digital chemistry, digital biology (think simulations, required degrees of accuracy and getting order out of perceived chaos, getting 1 and 0s out of human thought). Software is not com
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^^^Maybe at a community college. What you describe sounds like the syllabus for the CS205-Software Engineering course I took.
A real CS curriculum will be much broader than just software.
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If it is broader than software, then it's really a computer engineering or electrical engineering curriculum. The line might get a little fuzzy around the edges, but the line is still there.
For example, right now, I'm teaching a CS class that deals with C programming on Arduino, which combines a basic electronics course with a basic CS course. We call it a CS course because you have to categorize it as either CS or EE for curriculum purposes, but in reality, it is a combination of a CS course and an EE c
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Actually, computer programming is a subset of computer science. You cannot design and build computers without thought to how to design applications for and program them.
But by itself, teaching programming is not computer science any more than drivers ed would be automotive engineering.
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It's an introductory course for computer science.
When my parents learnt French they started by learning the theory, vocabulary and grammar. Putting it to practical use only came later. When I learned French we started by learning to converse. That's just how modern teaching works. Teach the practical stuff first and then expand it with theory later.
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I agree, language arts are best taught by learning the vocabulary and then the rules. This mimics how a child learns a language. However, that doesn't work with computer languages, to well, which really are not a true language and instead are a descriptive algorithm. The other difference is that languages are taught are taught conversationally today whereas programming is written out. You need the proper "grammatical" rules in the programming language or it won't compile and run. That is not the case wit
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Theory gives me a framework in which to place what I'm learning from practice. Without theory, I am forced to use my memory for everything. W
telescope science != astronomy (Score:2)
My arse it is. Computer science is a branch of mathematics.
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Ahem... Everything is a branch of mathematics, even if they don't know it, won't admit it, or are doing it wrong. *nods*
I, err... I might be a little biased.
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At my alma mater, a few of the upper level CS courses cross referenced as Math courses (like Theory of Computation). They shared enough courses that with a CS degree, automatically came a math minor.
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First, what, precisely, do you think algorithms are, if not computer software?
Second, no, computer science is broader than the study of algorithms. That's pretty much the definition of theoretical computer science. Computer science can also include subjects like:
These have almost not
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I'm obviously not the guy who said that; but I'll take a stab.
To me, CS is language agnostic. You could teach CS without a specific language or even a computer of any kind. You can teach binary arithmetic, recursion, sorting algorithms, and lambda calculus with pencil and paper. To me, CS is just specialized math.
Programming, as opposed to CS is the more practical working end of things. You need a computer with a language to teach programming.
You can teach programming and impart very little CS knowledge
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. We shouldn't really pass judgement until we see the curriculum, which I doubt anybody commenting here has.
There's a description of the curriculum in the paper (so yeah, maybe you're right, maybe no one here has seen it).
It's basic programming concepts, followed by python, followed by a lot of OOP.
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Designing computer circuits is engineering.
Debugging is exactly like science.. You want to know what's going on, you make hypotheses, test them, iterate until you know.
At least with chips, where you can't see what's happening directly. Software just expands to the point one step beyond our ability to debug it through observation.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:but its not obamas fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
The children of elites tend to have parents who care about scholastics, which is far and away the most accurate predictor of scholastic success, not school quality, dollars per pupil, class size, teacher quality, or other irrelevancies Democrats and Republicans argue about.
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Re:but its not obamas fault. (Score:4, Insightful)
Paris Hilton earns millions annually through TV, product endorsements, and her own brands. She has a net worth of over $100 million. Less than $5M of that came from her inheritance. She manages and invests her money well. I don't think she is as dumb as you think she is.
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Less than $5M of that came from her inheritance
Her biggest inheritance was the family name, and she exploited that to get the earnings you talk about. Her only talent is being famous.
Re:but its not obamas fault. (Score:4, Interesting)
Lots of people have a family name. Turning it into a brand the way she did is seriously impressive. Few here are anywhere near that caliber.
You are right. A family name isn't enough, you also need a sex tape.
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You are right. A family name isn't enough, you also need a sex tape.
The sex tape was not something that "just happened". It was "leaked" just three weeks before the premier of her first TV show, just enough time to reach maximum buzz before the show was aired, and it doubled or maybe tripled the number of viewers. She took no legal action to stop it, or limit its distribution. She was able to ride the publicity for a five-season run. She also wrote a New York Times bestseller about her life. She is not an air-head, but she plays one on TV.
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Huh. I thought sex tape was something you used to prevent leaks.
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Yup, nobody had EVER heard of the brand Hilton (Hotels) before Paris came along...
Hilton Hotels is not a reality TV brand. Conrad Hilton had dozens of great-grandchildren. None of the others are near as famous, or as rich, as Paris. She certainly had a lot of advantages in life. But she has built on those advantages, rather than squandering them like most of her relatives. Holding her up as an example of a "petulant child incapable of simple arithmetic" is nonsense.
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Does she actively manage all that money, or does she have some trusted insider do it for her?
I could see where she could possibly have some insight into a slice of the decisions that end up making her money -- she's probably as good an arbiter of what's fashionable in her circle as anyone.
She's not brilliant (Score:2)
Paris Hilton earns millions annually through TV, product endorsements, and her own brands. She has a net worth of over $100 million. Less than $5M of that came from her inheritance.
Presuming that is true then good for her doing so well prostituting herself. I find it amazing that anyone gives a damn about anything she is involved in but good for her for making something of her opportunities.
She manages and invests her money well.
No, she has people that manage her money well for her. I guaran-damn-tee you she isn't managing her money herself. She as agents, investment advisers, family connections, etc.
I don't think she is as dumb as you think she is.
I don't think she is some brilliant business woman either. She comes from a family with money. Along with that tends to
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>I don't think she is as dumb as you think she is.
I can't say much because I'm not an expert on this subject: It's 2016 and I still don't know what a Kardashian is.
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Babylon 5?
[John]
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Kardashian
Kardashian are a humanoid race, with light grey skin. Their faces have small ridges on their sides, which converge to a characteristic crest shape on their foreheads, with female Kardashian sporting a blue or blue-green coloration to their crest. This crest has led to the derogatory nickname "spoonheads" used by other races.
Not sure on the spelling though.
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But the Kardashian phenomenon (not sure if sacred location, diety, or artifact) has a net worth of over 9000, so _clearly_ there must be something of value for me to find.
Re:but its not obamas fault. (Score:4, Informative)
The children of elites tend to have parents who care about scholastics, which is far and away the most accurate predictor of scholastic success
No. This is wrong. The most accurate predictors of scholastic success are 1) IQ of the child's biological parents, and 2) Household income. Having "parents that care" makes no measureable difference once you compensate for IQ and income. What the parents do matters far less than who the parents are.
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The most accurate predictors of scholastic success are 1) IQ of the child's biological parents, and 2) Household income.
Is that also true if you correct household income for IQ of the parents/caretakers ?
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No, that's wrong. In the UK there was a big push to encourage parents to read to their children, and then to start teaching them to read so that by the time they started school at age 4 they could at least recognize some letters. It had a significant effect on academic outcomes and has been integrated into many pre-school activities.
On the other end of the scale, it's been shown that children starting school unable to speak English (e.g. because their parents speak something else) is a major disadvantage an
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They have to keep on repeating the Big Lie. They can't portray themselves as the knight in shining armor if there isn't some grave injustice that needs correcting. They need to repeat the media narrative that upward mobility isn't possible.
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It's very likely your grandfather was an intelligent man, but did not have much opportunity in his life for any number of reasons. For instance, if he or his own parents were immigrant
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An entire parallel yet grossly superior system of education exists for millionaires and billionaires
And yet, that grossly superior system of education only managed to produce crap politicians. Half of them even deny basic science such as evolution and greenhouse effect of CO2.
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An entire parallel yet grossly superior system of education exists for millionaires and billionaires
And yet, that grossly superior system of education only managed to produce crap politicians. Half of them even deny basic science such as evolution and greenhouse effect of CO2.
Yet they got elected. Which means they succeeded at their chosen profession. Seems their education prepared them just fine.
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Seems their education prepared them just fine.
Or, more likely, their education had little to do with it.
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Half of them even deny basic science such as evolution and greenhouse effect of CO2.
That is because the focus groups tell them this is what they need to do to win the election. Politicians at the national level are very smart people. They would not get to that level if they were not. Bill Clinton has an IQ of 160, but he talked like a hick because he knew people would not vote for a pointy headed intellectual.
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They would not get to that level if they were not.
They only have to outsmart the other candidate, not actual people with brains.
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If you bothered to do any research you'd find that this school, follows the Harvard, MIT, etc. model wherein tuition is exceedingly high, but financial aid is made available on a need basis. According to the school [sidwell.edu] the average recipient is awarded $25,708. While still a bit steep, that places tuition within reach of those not in the %1 club, and helps ensure only academically motivated parents apply to send their kids there.
Bashing successful people might seem like a fun, cathartic way to deal with your o
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Should not politicians responsible for the state of public schools be required by law to force their children to attend those schools. Consider this, they judge the schools they manage not good enough for their children but for the majority of the electorate, suck it up, those schools are as shitty as they can get away with. If public schools are good enough for the children of politicians, then those politicians are not good enough for the parents of children in public schools!!!
interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way.
It's a feature, not a bug. Coding isn't interesting unless you have a mind for it. And if you have a mind for it, you don't need a creative teacher and colorful projects to make it interesting for you.
Re:interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
That's ridiculous. Many, many people come to things later in life that they were initially turned off of by truly horrid teachers.
When I was in elementary I *HATED* maths and science because the way my teachers taught it was aggressively boring. It was all rote memorization of formulae and processes, and there was zero joy or excitement - they taught it like people who didn't actually know the material and were just reading from a teacher's guide, because that's exactly what they were.
We moved and I went to a better school, and I was STUNNED at how interesting the teachers were able to make subjects I previously hated and dreaded.
Flash forward to now and I've had a long career as both an engineer and a research scientist. Given my successful career, I'd say I definitely have a mind for it, which I might never have come to realize if I'd had to continue staying with shitty teachers who seemed to go out of their way to make it boring.
And I know a LOT of people who have had similar experiences. Dismissing a huge swath of people as somehow unworthy or incapable simply because they don't immediately become fascinated by a subject is absurd. Funny enough though, it's a pretty common attitude by people in tech.
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Dismissing a huge swath of people as somehow unworthy or incapable simply because they don't immediately become fascinated by a subject is absurd.
No doubt cases like yours happen, but very doubtful we're talking about a huge swath. And in the context of national budget allocations, it's best to focus on the big groups, and not worry too much about the few that fall through the cracks. Has nothing to do with emotional terms such as "unworthy". It's just basic statistics.
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I don't mean to intrude on a good rant, but if you *really* want to improve things, you need to re-examine this statement. Do you truly believe that your elementary school maths teachers did not know elementary school math?
Yes, I truly believe my elementary school maths teachers did not KNOW elementary school math.
I believe they could DO elementary school math - as in, they had, as most people do, the processes down and could arrive at a correct answer when presented with an arithmetic problem.
But they did
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How many people interested in cooking, baking, or wood shop know what coding can do for them?
I have yet to see a high school or voctech program that teaches practical uses to coding.
To a controls engineer the modern home kitchen is an embarrassment of control systems. Steam engine centrifugal governors had better control than an over bought in 2016. It has zero disturbance rejection (opening the oven door). And has one setting. I've got all the items and am going to make my own ramp/soak controller so that
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I should have a counter top device that can measure out with perfect accuracy any liquid.
Great, but the challenges of making a design that works with any kind of liquid without cross contamination, or bacterial growth inside the device have nothing to do with basic coding skills.
it is like hearing that most people don't need to learn to type
Typing is an easy and useful skill that nearly everybody can learn. For a better analogy, compare coding to playing the piano. I have absolutely no talent for music, and all my school music lessons have been a total waste of time. Concert pianists aren't discovered through basic music lessons at school.
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When I was very young, my older brother would have friends over and they would play D&D. Being the pesky kid sister, I wanted to play with them, and my folks insisted they let me play. So I made a character (a very time consuming process) and triumphantly joined their game and... my character was immediately killed by a dragon swooping down from the sky who then flew off, job done.
So I took a couple of hours to make another character and... killed by a random passing ogre. My brother and his friends wer
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For the want of mod points.
I was always the kid that never stopped asking 'why', 'because' was never a valid excuse (and still isn't). Teachers that showed me how ___ could be used to do what I wanted to do were far more effective than telling me what ____ could do for me.
If you ask a classroom of 30 students what they want to do you're going to get 30 different answers. They key to teaching them advanced concepts it telling them how advanced concepts can help them achieve those goals.
You like photography?
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With kids especially, since they tend to developmentally lack certain structures that are essential to abstract thinking. You have to be practical because nothing else will work (except in extremely rare cases).
After D&D, we got a modem and I totally lost my mind when I realized that there were other human beings out there who also had computers and wanted to talk, so I started using a really simple chat program on The Source to bug people who were on line (with appropriate parental supervision).
Then so
The rich are going to get theirs (Score:4, Interesting)
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Stop asking yourself how you can stop them from getting it and how we can get it for everybody else. All crap like this story does is get people yelling about govt waste. And all that happens when you try to cut it is your education budget for your kid's school gets cut.
The education budget for our kids schools is being cut anyway and if we don't complain about mis-allocation of taxpayer money like this blatant misuse of public funds then nothing will change.
Maybe nothing will change anyway but if we don't complain it is certain not to.
I mean really - half a million dollars of taxpayer money going to a private school for the rich?
It's disgusting.
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Rational thought doesn't come into this, it's just anger, jealousy and a vague feeling of unfairness. It's either rich people looking after their own, or racists only helping black kids, or sexists only helping girls... The only way people can feel like victims is if they assume everyone else is getting a hand up except for them.
Trends (Score:4, Insightful)
In any case, here is the curriculum they used:
1) programming (bouncing ball, kindergarten picture)
2) functions, variables, basic loops, 2D arrays (image processing)
3) fundamentals, control structures (Andy Wharhol, Green Screen)
4) algorithm development (finding the robots ball)
**At this point, the students are given a four-week introduction to Python** 5) OOP: classes, polymorphism, animation (bouncing ball, sea creature)
6) OOP and design (space invaders)
7) Abstraction Strings (data visualization)
8) OOP: interfaces (swimmable object, paint)
9) OOP: inheritance (sea creature inheritance)
10) Recursion (hanoi tower)
11) algorithm development, OOP: encapsulation (robot maze)
Personally I would rather see less emphasis on OOP, and more emphasis on "the proving mindset" (the proving mindset being, when you write code, try to think of everything that can go wrong, every possibility). It's kind of hard to understand when OOP is a good thing without writing bad code first.....
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Plus, OOP is not the right solution for some parts of systems. The "OO everywhere" mentality of the last decade is mostly dead. We've learned, yet again, "use the right tool for the job".
The FP (functional) fans are making the same mistake lately, I believe: "FP everywhere". In part because JavaScript (ironically) has a lousy OOP model such that people stick anonymous functions all over the place. (Oh oh, I didn't mean to start a Paradigm War.)
For example, JS's "setTimout" should be part of a "timer" class
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Plus, OOP is not the right solution for some parts of systems.
Yeah, teaching OOP at that level is more of indoctrination, because they don't have the tools they need to understand when it is a good choice, and when it isn't.
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You're making the assumption that people need to learn to do all of that.
Most people would be good knowing 1-3 and spending 4-11 learning how to apply it to solve their problems. Someone interested in baking doesn't need to know everything else, they need to learn how coding can help solve their baking problems.
The problem is that it's not being taught with practical applications to most people.
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And maybe programming will help with that.
Kipling I'm not (Score:3)
It's that way for many things. I never took to writing a great novel either although I took English, writing and literature most of my school years.
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It's that way for many things. I never took to writing a great novel either although I took English, writing and literature most of my school years.
It's also complete bullshit. As if the President wants his daughters to be programmers. What a crock.
It's an attempted justification for an abuse of taxpayer money.
"CS not interesting" (Score:3, Interesting)
"part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way"
It has nothing to do with the teaching technique. You can't force people to become interested in computer science and programming. If you aren't the type of person who is naturally drawn towards this particular type of problem solving, you'll quickly be discouraged by the constant setbacks and frustration that accompany all programming endeavors. Very few people have the natural mathematical talent and abstract thinking abilities necessary to enjoy this work and thus overcome the first 5-10 years of pain and eventually become good.
and down the GOP road soon HS will come to loans (Score:2)
and down the GOP road soon HS will come to loans. Want to be stuck with 80-100K be for college and to get a good job you need to get the masters or phd for 150-300K more?
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You can lead a horse to water... (Score:4, Insightful)
"part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way."
If someone needs to convince you that CS is interesting, then maybe CS is not for you. I've never known a really good programmer who got into the field because someone coddled and cajoled them into it. On the contrary, they seek out every opportunity they can find to learn more on their own initiative.
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Not to mention that if they make it their career, they better be able to get enjoyment out of it on their own or they're not going to last long in the workforce. Offices don't generally come with cheerleaders.
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You're thinking of the problem backwards.
You don't need to teach kids CS to get them into CS. You need to teach them programming and give them practical applications to how they can use it to do what they are interested in
Someone interested in baking doesn't need to know how to make a good bubble sort. They should be able to make a basic PID controller and a ramp-soak controller. Brand new oven 'controls' are an embarrassment to the field of controls. But I would bet that no one sat down someone interested
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I had another "software engineer" that learned about the singleton pattern. Made me an library to call that implemented it as a system wide mutex. I could not create the same object mor
Sidwell Friends ... (Score:2)
For those *not* from the DC area --
Sidwell Friends is the school where the kids of many politicians end up going. Clinton's kid went there, as did Nixon's and Teddy Roosevelt's.
For those congress people that bring their families to DC, many of their kids go there, too. Along with ambassadors' kids, VP's kids, judge's kids, various CEO's kids, etc.
It'd actually be more surprising if a president who had grade school kids *didn't* sent their kids to Sidwell Friends.
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Well Rounded IT (Score:2)
Why emphasize just coding when programming jobs may shrink? [i-programmer.info]
While I agree that programming is decent entry-level job into other IT fields, I'm not sure the emphasis of IT teaching should be on coding. Structural factoring (basic normalization, redundancy identification), set theory, logic, general architecture (clients, servers, databases, networks, security) and so forth should also be part of such courses.
Even if you never code on the job, understanding the relationships between data elements and system pa
So.. (Score:3)
Sidwell Friends School (Score:3)
In keeping with Quaker tenets, Sidwell Friends School seeks a student body that represents varied economic backgrounds. In 2015-2016, 23% of our students will receive approximately $6,700,000 of financial aid support with an average aid award of $25,708, which covers two-thirds of the average tuition cost.
Financial Aid [sidwell.edu]
All students must acquire at least 20 credits before graduating. Students are required to take four years of English, three years of mathematics, three years of history, two years of one foreign language, two years of science, and two years of art. In addition to this, all freshmen must take a full year Freshman Studies course. Sidwell is a member school of School Year Abroad.
Notable alumni
Ann Brashares, author, "The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants"
Margaret Edison, playwright, Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Walter Gilbert, Nobel Prize chemist
Hannah Gray, later President of the University of Chicago
Davis Guggenheim, director, "An Inconvenient Truth"
Campbell McGrath, poet, MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award winner
Bill Nye, "Science Guy"
Robert Watson, computer science and network security, FreeBSD
Sidwell Friends School/A? [wikipedia.org]
Best known? (Score:2)
Saying Sidwell Friends is best known because President Obama's kids go there is something like saying that the White House is best known because JFK lived there. The school has been regarded as one of the premier schools in the DC area for over a century; Theodore Roosevelt's son Archibald, Richard Nixon's daughter Tricia, Bill Clinton's daughter Chelsea Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore's son, Albert Gore III, all graduated from Sidwell Friends.
Re:whaaa? (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently the rich plan to grow up to be code monkeys rather than hedge fund managers, CEOs or anonymous board members these days.
Re: (Score:2)
Half a million to what is probably the most expensive and exclusive school in the US. And, a Private school at that.
Wasn't there some school in the not so nice areas of DC that could have used that money?
Re: (Score:3)
Slashdot Flushed Down The Toilet (Score:2)
Who do you think is behind all this 'women are the same as men and therefore must be given men's jobs' bullshit? You'll notice that women aren't being given DANGEROUS jobs that men die while doing, like construction, foundry work, oil rig work, mining, you name it. More JEWISH nation-wrecking.
In 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 9,813,000 people working in the construction industry. Of these, 872,000 of them, or 8.9 percent, were women.
Women in the U.S. earn on average 82.1 percent what men make. The gender pay gap is much narrower in the construction industry. In construction, women earn on average 93.4 percent what men make
Statistics of Women in Construction [nawic.org] [National Association of Women in Construction
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, tons of schools get grants for all sorts of things all the time. The only reason you're hearing about this one is that it just happened to involve the school Obama's daughters go to. You don't hear anything about the hundreds of other grants given to other schools they don't go to, because talking about them wouldn't fit the political narrative.