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How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

forrestbrazeal.com

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

#11

Disappointed. I thought the article was going to focus on why a computer isn't even necessary for a computer science degree. In other words - how a computer science degree is mostly just a degree in mathematics, and a lot of the coding that you do (algorithm work, obviously not a software engineering or programming intensive course) should be done with pencil. I have been seeing a lot of articles claiming that a barr…

Never?

That sounds like a sure way to make sure any students who took that class would be very disengaged.

Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

#12

Misleading title - He took class notes using a notebook instead of a laptop. I dared to hope to find some absurd story about turning in his CS homework in hand-written C++...

That was what I was doing for the whole first semester of my CS studies: we learned basics of C++ by writing code on paper or on the board. It was very basic stuff, aimed at people who never programmed before, so we learned about loops and other control structures cin/cout streams etc. Probably that's why my CS department stuff thought it would be a waste to let us use real computers in the university's labs :)

Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

#13

Disappointed. I thought the article was going to focus on why a computer isn't even necessary for a computer science degree. In other words - how a computer science degree is mostly just a degree in mathematics, and a lot of the coding that you do (algorithm work, obviously not a software engineering or programming intensive course) should be done with pencil. I have been seeing a lot of articles claiming that a barr…

Computer science is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use."

-- Hal Abelson (1986)

Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

#14

Disappointed. I thought the article was going to focus on why a computer isn't even necessary for a computer science degree. In other words - how a computer science degree is mostly just a degree in mathematics, and a lot of the coding that you do (algorithm work, obviously not a software engineering or programming intensive course) should be done with pencil. I have been seeing a lot of articles claiming that a barr…

Never? That sounds like a sure way to make sure any students who took that class would be very disengaged.

I did my first programming with pencil and paper, and I'm still engaged 30+ years later

Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

#15

Misleading title - He took class notes using a notebook instead of a laptop. I dared to hope to find some absurd story about turning in his CS homework in hand-written C++...

I'm doing an Electronics A Level, and we have to hand write code in a fictional assembly dialect.

Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never? That sounds like a sure way to make sure any students who took that class would be very disengaged.

I did my first programming with pencil and paper, and I'm still engaged 30+ years later

We're talking about high school here though. Seems to me it would be like running a chemistry class without doing any lab work.

Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

#17

Pretty much everyone in my university took notes on paper in CS classes. Most of it was just math which is much easier to note down with pen and paper (I tried tablets with a stylus but still prefer pen+paper).

The best version I've seen for image-heavy lectures is the lecturer writing with his pad on half-prepared slides, which have also been given to the students for print-out.

It combines the advantages from pure slides with pure blackboard writing:

- The student has enough time to think and not just write (has often been a problem when the professor is writing very fast and doing complicated stuff).

- The student still gets to 'touch' the material and have their own take on it, and writes the critical points and diagrams themselves.

- There is no fear of missing something in the hand-written notes when as when deciding between writing and thinking/try to figure out which parts to note down.

Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

#18

Disappointed. I thought the article was going to focus on why a computer isn't even necessary for a computer science degree. In other words - how a computer science degree is mostly just a degree in mathematics, and a lot of the coding that you do (algorithm work, obviously not a software engineering or programming intensive course) should be done with pencil. I have been seeing a lot of articles claiming that a barr…

I took AP Computer Science my senior year in high school (would have been... 2010? So 6 years ago) and we didn't touch computers until about halfway through the class. Before then, it was all theory and logic and big O and the like mostly in pseudocode. Then, we jumped into writing Java to match the theory we had learned. It worked wonderfully, and I found my first year in college was pretty much just re-learning what I learned that year in high school but much, much, much, much (much) slower because they were teaching Java WITH the theory instead of separate to it (which had a side effect of students being locked-in to Java in later years and not able to reason about theory in other languages)

Also, the AP test that we had to take after all was said and done was required to be done in pencil. So it was good to be used to writing pseudocode and actual code in pencil.

In college, I wouldn't have even considered typing my notes during class. I'd say about half the students in my classes used pencils, the other half typed (but were always actually checking facebook, looking at reddit, etc.). After a while, I stopped taking notes altogether when I figured out they really don't help me in any way and I never go back to them (anything I could forget is a google search and a stack overflow answer away).

Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

#19

Disappointed. I thought the article was going to focus on why a computer isn't even necessary for a computer science degree. In other words - how a computer science degree is mostly just a degree in mathematics, and a lot of the coding that you do (algorithm work, obviously not a software engineering or programming intensive course) should be done with pencil. I have been seeing a lot of articles claiming that a barr…

Never? That sounds like a sure way to make sure any students who took that class would be very disengaged.

Depends on what you are doing. If you're trying to teach Van Emde Boas trees, then yeah without coding no one will like to work on that, but there are so many insightful topics.

One example would be modal logic. There is something inherently attractive about reasoning about time. Once you put it into context, it is very difficult to not find it inspiring.

Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

#20

Disappointed. I thought the article was going to focus on why a computer isn't even necessary for a computer science degree. In other words - how a computer science degree is mostly just a degree in mathematics, and a lot of the coding that you do (algorithm work, obviously not a software engineering or programming intensive course) should be done with pencil. I have been seeing a lot of articles claiming that a barr…

>Nonsense. If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer. Pencil and paper only.

You would want to be the Dolores Umbridge of high school computer science?

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