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On the making of a girl nerd

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Re: On the making of a girl nerd

#51

Post by vitno »

Jach wrote: post #44
vitno wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorting algorithms are useful for teaching though. Not only do they help the student with writing code, the introduce important parts of programming as well as Big-O notation. Maybe you are right, but if someone was dangling a "Lets learn Unity3D" course in front of me, I would never ever attend that university.

> Not only do they help the student with writing code, the introduce important parts of programming as well as Big-O notation. Are sorting algos the best methods for helping students write code and learning about Big-O? I don't think so. Learning the fundamental data structures are a lot more useful for that purpose, I think. Of the standard crop, I think the binary search is a good algorithm to teach (though one mus…

Those are pretty cool, but they really aren't as useful as understanding how a sort works.

I would fully support a Python w/ pygame course in high school. That would be pretty neat.

Re: On the making of a girl nerd

#52

Post by frossie »

jbellis wrote: post #34
yummyfajitas wrote: post #24

Is the article seriously advocating increasing the number of women in CS by watering down their college courses? An easy "gold" course for the girls, a harder "black" course for boys (and the few girls who would have done CS absent any intervention)? I also found this very annoying: "I have found an amazing correlation between women with math Ph.D.’s and women whose fathers are mathematicians...you wouldn’t be able t…

No, it's advocating increasing the number of women in CS by proposing a separate 101 course for people (like, the article assumes, most women) with no prior programming experience, while retaining an "introduction" course for those who do have that. I didn't see any implication that higher-level courses should have separate tracks.

Indeed, and let's not forget the other half of her point, which was to have introductory level courses focus on solving examples from across science, rather than CS esoterics. From personal experience I agree that if you are trying to get someone interested in a tool, show them what the tool can do before showing them how the tool is made (or how to make their own).

Re: On the making of a girl nerd

#53

Post by thejteam »

mhurron wrote: post #7
macavity23 wrote: post #2

Anyone even considering teaching Java as a first language to high school students should be given a good sound slap - and I say this as a Java dev.

Why? What is so bad about Java that it makes learning it so bad as a first language or as a introduction to programming?

Too object oriented. I would hate to have to explain what a class is before I explained what a loop or a conditional is. We have to assume people are starting from nothing.

Or like others have said we could hand-wave it away until later.

Re: On the making of a girl nerd

#54

Post by eli »

agentgt wrote: post #32
eli wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to that it was C++. I think they're actually moving in the right direction.

And before that it was Pascal.... I know cause I tried to take it after teaching myself Pascal a day before the exam (I new C/C++). I got so caught up in the stupid syntax of the language that think I got a 2 or 3 :(

Pascal does indeed have goofy syntax, but it was designed to be a teaching language. I think that makes more sense than C++.

Re: On the making of a girl nerd

#55

Post by tantalor »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #49
Jach wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a presentation at my old high school about why programming is awesome in general, and had a couple notes on this. I counted 18 unique facts that need to be mentioned in order to completely understand a Java Hello World, and 25 for C++. For Python, it's either 4 or 5 depending on whether you start with the REPL or not.

In Javascript it's either: document.write("Hello, world"); or: alert("Hello, world"); Two lines of overhead counting the script tags. For all its faults (and they are many) I think I'd argue for Javascript as a first teaching language (maybe focusing on Crockford's "good parts", or maybe some variant like Coffeescript). Minimal overhead. Support for reasonably advanced concepts like objects and anonymous functions. W…

IIRC Code Academy teaches JavaScript with,

console.log("Hello World");

Re: On the making of a girl nerd

#56

Post by Jach »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #49
Jach wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a presentation at my old high school about why programming is awesome in general, and had a couple notes on this. I counted 18 unique facts that need to be mentioned in order to completely understand a Java Hello World, and 25 for C++. For Python, it's either 4 or 5 depending on whether you start with the REPL or not.

In Javascript it's either: document.write("Hello, world"); or: alert("Hello, world"); Two lines of overhead counting the script tags. For all its faults (and they are many) I think I'd argue for Javascript as a first teaching language (maybe focusing on Crockford's "good parts", or maybe some variant like Coffeescript). Minimal overhead. Support for reasonably advanced concepts like objects and anonymous functions. W…

The necessary HTML dings the number of unique things up so it's not quite that simple. But I like the idea of being able to easily share your creations, I started with PHP and a friend let me FTP files onto a subdomain he set up for me. I remember sharing a "99 bottles of beer" print-out with online friends when I learned about for loops. (I also remember spiking the server load by increasing the number into the billions...) I think a JS oriented programming class has as much merit as a Python one. We can discuss tradeoffs more (e.g. JS's style of OOP is superficially further from Java's than Python's is and AP culture still favors Java/C++ style OOP, which PHP is actually very similar to) but I think they're both better attractors into the field than Java.

Re: On the making of a girl nerd

#57

Post by pyre »

cs702 wrote: post #38

Most of the comments (so far) are focusing primarily on the details of the Harvey Mudd example instead of the much broader, more important theme of mathbabe's post: She wants educators to think seriously about the selection process for young nerds and how this process is currently biased so as to weed out girls . She believes we can do much better. She speaks from personal experience. On a different post on her blog,…

I think that speaks more to the general attitudes towards life of the teacher. The general premise is, "why challenge yourself when you coast through without putting in the effort?" It's wrapped up in sexism (girls don't need math), but boiled down to its base form, that's what she's telling those kids.

Re: On the making of a girl nerd

#58

Post by UnFleshedOne »

sirclueless wrote: post #15
mhurron wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What is so bad about Java that it makes learning it so bad as a first language or as a introduction to programming?

Having tried to tutor beginning programmers in Java, there are a lot of things that bug me. There is a lot of boilerplate and cruft that must exist in order to get anything done, and the type system and visibility just gets in the way until you want to teach people how to architect large programs. Each class must be in its own file, and the execution starts from "public static void main(String[] args)" inside it. The…

I "got" indentation after spending 2 days hunting down some bug in calculations only to have the teacher take 1 minute to reformat the code and another minute to point out an instruction that was sitting in the inner loop. With proper formatting it was a glaringly obvious mistake...

Re: On the making of a girl nerd

#59

Post by cschmidt »

frossie wrote: post #52
jbellis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's advocating increasing the number of women in CS by proposing a separate 101 course for people (like, the article assumes, most women) with no prior programming experience, while retaining an "introduction" course for those who do have that. I didn't see any implication that higher-level courses should have separate tracks.

Indeed, and let's not forget the other half of her point, which was to have introductory level courses focus on solving examples from across science, rather than CS esoterics. From personal experience I agree that if you are trying to get someone interested in a tool, show them what the tool can do before showing them how the tool is made (or how to make their own).

MIT has a class like this as well, 6.00

https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp12/6.00/index.html

    This subject is aimed at students with little or no programming experience. 
    It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation 
    can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of 
    their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small 
    programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the
    Python programming language.

Re: On the making of a girl nerd

#60

Post by cs702 »

pyre wrote: post #57
cs702 wrote: post #38

Most of the comments (so far) are focusing primarily on the details of the Harvey Mudd example instead of the much broader, more important theme of mathbabe's post: She wants educators to think seriously about the selection process for young nerds and how this process is currently biased so as to weed out girls . She believes we can do much better. She speaks from personal experience. On a different post on her blog,…

I think that speaks more to the general attitudes towards life of the teacher. The general premise is, "why challenge yourself when you coast through without putting in the effort?" It's wrapped up in sexism (girls don't need math), but boiled down to its base form, that's what she's telling those kids.

Agree -- that's a good way to summarize what that teacher told mathbabe and the other two girls. Regardless, of the three girls, only mathbabe persisted with math; the other two were unfairly weeded out. The question is, is this type of weeding-out pervasive? Mathbabe clearly believes the answer is yes, and we should we doing something about it.
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