Taking notes on a computer by itself never really helped me learn. I would always write down on paper everything I typed on a computer during class. Doing this would help solidify the lesson in my mind.
How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but that's how chemistry is taught in 3rd world countries. Labs are a luxury :)
Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're talking about high school here though. Seems to me it would be like running a chemistry class without doing any lab work.
Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but that's how chemistry is taught in 3rd world countries. Labs are a luxury :)
Eh fair, although RPi Zeros are pretty cheap these days :).
Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree. One of the most magic moments when you start programming is when you write your first program that does a truly significant amount of work. You run it, you're still kind of on human time scale and think it's going to take a few seconds, but it finishes instantly. That was the moment that really hooked me into programming.
Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again
#25Disappointed. 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…
Growing up I didn't have a computer at home. I would write my solutions in a paper, evaluate it mentally/with a pencil a few times, take it to my school or a friend's place and run it; only to find there is an issue. Rinse and repeat. I did this quite a few times and got really good at it. However, none of the languages are intuitive when you are learning it for the first time. You could easily be stuck at the most trivial of things about syntax, scoping, ..etc. Mistakes in a situation like mine are expensive - it usually takes a few days before I could verify again if my solution worked. It's really easy to lose your patience and move on.
Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again
#26Disappointed. 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…
> If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer. Pencil and paper only.
That would be a disservice to the students. Being able to code is probably the best predictor for students successfully completing a CS degree.
Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again
#27Misleading 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.
Good to see they haven't updated the curriculum since I did it fifteen years ago!
Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again
#28I'd be interested also to know what people think about taking notes on a tablet with a stylus. I've never done this, and I think it could provide some of the benefits of taking notes on paper, but not all. For example, turning physical pages and visualizing data in concrete locations would still be more helpful for me, since I'm a spatial learner.
I've done this for a variety of subjects, and I rather like it... but it depends on having a very good tablet and a very good stylus (e.g. iPad Pro, Surface Pro, or so on).
For me there were two key points: it makes it very easy to drop in photos of slides or diagrams, and it makes it very easy to rearrange page contents after doing a first pass of ad-hoc notes.
Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again
#29I can't help but think...I got my CP/CS degree with pencil and paper, and the only computer I used was a timeshared VAX and PDP11 at the university lab, so I'm not really sure what the big deal is here.
Sure I wrote some code on those systems, but 90% of my work was done with pencil, papar, and a HP11c calculator.
Re: How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again
#30Disappointed. 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…
> If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer. Pencil and paper only. That would be a disservice to the students. Being able to code is probably the best predictor for students successfully completing a CS degree.
You can write code with pencil and paper