Posts tagged teaching
An interesting argument: that calculating devices are now ubiquitous, and math should focus on computational problem-solving instead of drilling and memorisation. An example the author cites:
Computer languages allow students to transform ideas into action. Here is a simple rule that a math teacher might describe to her students: If the number is greater than 9, carry the 10’s place; otherwise add the number to the bottom row.
The solution for this can be expressed as a simple if/else statement:
if (number > 9)
carry += number / 10;
else
bottom += number;
There are, as expected, plenty of opposing views in the comments, but it’s good food for thought. Also noteworthy: the comments aren’t completely stupid. Not-completely-stupid comments! On the Internet! WHAT IS THIS WORLD WE’RE LIVING IN
From the blog behind the “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python” book:
“[For] the casually interested or schoolchildren with several activities competing for their attention, programming concepts like variables and loops and data types aren’t interesting in themselves. They don’t want to learn how to program just for the sake of programming. They don’t want to learn about algorithm complexity or implicit casting. They want to make Super Mario or Twitter or Angry Birds.”
We’ve actually found that our students are usually quite happy to spend lots of time making silly console-output programs, like printing a pyramid of asterisks. However, the intro programming courses we’ve conducted have been for a fairly self-selected bunch.
The book is available online for free, and it certainly looks like a great instructional resource.
Joel Spolsky, who’s on the board:
This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school.
We forgot to link to this when everyone did last week, but it’s worth mentioning:
Make your New Year’s resolution learning to code. Sign up on Code Year to get a new interactive programming lesson sent to you each week and you’ll be building apps and web sites before you know it.
Another great product from the Codecademy folks.
In-browser runtimes for Ruby, Python and JavaScript, by the same folks who are bringing us browser-based programming courses.
Looks perfect for intro programming, albeit only on the console. Looking forward to see how it deals with exercises that are more graphical, and those which make use of external libraries.
(Repost — last one wasn’t a link, oops)
Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC argues that Computer Science education sorely needs improvement in the UK, in order to boost the country’s waning video game industry. (That’s where Tomb Raider, Fable and Grand Theft Auto originated.)
An interesting point:
“Somehow the classroom got hijacked by ICT. And that is learning about Powerpoint, Word, Excel - useful but boring after more than a week of learning it. “
There isn’t a direct Singaporean equivalent of the UK ICT curriculum, but we do have the MOE IT Masterplan for ICT in Education, with the BY(i)TES score (3.0!) as a metric. Our requirements look a little broader than the UK’s, and cover educational technology usage in the classroom as well as “ICT leadership” (whatever that means). However, none of this says anything about delivering any “actual” Computer Science education in the classroom, which feels like a pity.
I’m still wondering what the US is doing differently that’s resulted in a resurgence in CS education — has all this been driven entirely by the very public successes of Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies?
CodeRunner is a Mac app that lets you:
Edit and run code in AppleScript, C, C++, Java, JavaScript (Node.js), Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Shell or any other language you might have installed on your system.
This could be really useful for programming teachers — one of the big headaches we always have in the first lesson was making sure things were set up properly. There was a time we tried teaching C++, and found out that the computers’ permission settings disallowed running of any shell programs, so we sang songs and dreamed of correcting missing semi-colons. Ah, fun times.
