I wonder how different things would be if cs departments had a special lab without mice.
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
51–60 of 200 posts
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#52I just graduated from University of Colorado Boulder this last semester with a CS degree, and am glad to say that this was a required course. It was a 3000 level course called Software Development that also incorporated a long form group project for team cooperation skills. It definitely helped me to improve my efficiency and organization when working on projects. Teaching thoughtfulness in designing not only a solution, but a work environment, is an important lesson.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#53I graduated a top 50 school, that gave us an “engineering” degree but had no such similar course. There were no more than 20 students, out of 300ish, who understood the material of this course well enough to teach it. From my perspective, this knowledge was generally inversely correlated to GPA and strongly correlated to postgrad performance. Take my anecdata for what it is, but I think these skills are strongly unde…
I think what's happening is that motivated individuals learn these things by doing, sometimes starting at an early age. Teaching these topics explicitly will probably not automatically turn students into 10x hackers; however it might help some. I know I cry a little on the inside any time I have to explain grep to an engineer that has been around for more than a year.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#54Probably at less depth but I ended up learning quite a lot of these topics at GCSE (16ish), with the exception of proper version control although I taught myself git and C++ instead of actually working. Probably quite lucky in retrospect
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#55I graduated a top 50 school, that gave us an “engineering” degree but had no such similar course. There were no more than 20 students, out of 300ish, who understood the material of this course well enough to teach it. From my perspective, this knowledge was generally inversely correlated to GPA and strongly correlated to postgrad performance. Take my anecdata for what it is, but I think these skills are strongly unde…
> these skills are strongly underrated by universities and students alike.
Universities believe their focus should be on timeless principles, and expect that students will supplement their instruction as needed. For example, teaching students the Bourne Again shell isn't useful on Windows, and declining in importance in macOS. Same logic applies to editors, but even more wildly varied. Rather than build 20 courses, one for every IDE, and then revisit the pedagogy every year as software changes, they basically lean heavily on 'you're smart enough to figure this out on your own.'
Some of this is obviously motivated post-hoc reasoning but still makes a modicum of sense -- anyone with 5 years exp could probably teach undergrads bash and git (with maybe 40 hours of prep), so university instructors with PhDs should be focusing on knowledge gained from research findings that wouldn't find their way into industry via other means.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#56Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…
Since you mention scrolling using key repeat - it truly is painful to watch someone do it on default settings. And there are usually better ways to do that sort of thing. But sometimes, there is no substitute: going to the right spot in the middle of a word/line, moving around a page, browser title bars, etc. Here's the kicker though: most keyboard repeat rate settings around have a maximum that is pretty much unusable! But you can fix it thusly:
xset r rate 180 60
When I work on my computer it's like driving a Porsche. When I sit at someone else's it's like I tripped over a door threshold.
There are ways to adjust this on OSX too but it's a lot more touchy. Haven't attempted on Windows.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#57I graduated a top 50 school, that gave us an “engineering” degree but had no such similar course. There were no more than 20 students, out of 300ish, who understood the material of this course well enough to teach it. From my perspective, this knowledge was generally inversely correlated to GPA and strongly correlated to postgrad performance. Take my anecdata for what it is, but I think these skills are strongly unde…
> these skills are strongly underrated by universities and students alike. Universities believe their focus should be on timeless principles, and expect that students will supplement their instruction as needed. For example, teaching students the Bourne Again shell isn't useful on Windows, and declining in importance in macOS. Same logic applies to editors, but even more wildly varied. Rather than build 20 courses, o…
I don't think it's really coming from any sort of high priesthood dedicated to the noble, timeless principles. It's just boring human stuff.
Professors aren't typically trained educators, many of them at best tolerate their teaching duties. They muddled through, why doesn't everyone else?
In sports there's a truism that "good athletes make bad coaches". Brilliant former PhD students often make bad teachers. Whatever the timeless principles might be, they're useless without some craft.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#58The missing topic in missing semester: how to design and build frameworks
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#59I can't speak for any other schools, but before I dropped out of Florida State, they had a class called "Intro to Unix", which was only worth one credit.
We all were given login credentials to a server and our assignments were typically Bash scripts; there was one class spent on Vi, and the professor combined the Nano and Emacs class together. We also learned how to do Makefiles and how to run GCC...
I had assumed that this was standard in most CS majors...was I wrong?
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#60Thank you a lot for posting this link.
I am majoring in CSE in India and I think you guys have it still better. India's engineering education (maybe except IITs) is completely screwed up by people who don't know what they are doing. The average student here doesn't come out of interest but for sake of getting some job. There are lot of people who don't understand difference between text editor and word processor till end of the 4 year program, but still get an 'S' grade (>90% score) because of rote learning system. Leave alone mastering the tools, they expect to open a PDF/docx in their phones and copy it to the computer. Having said that, the college I study is one of "top" colleges of the state.
They foolishly waste 1 year in our life by teaching "common" subjects like chemistry, physics, elements of {electronics,mechanical,civil} engineering etc.. I mean, they may be somewhat marginally useful, but they waste time and money for that while there's lot of stuff to learn in CS itself; just because some baldhead decided it would be good to teach all subjects to engineering students in first year.
I really wish I could study in US.