Great piece - thanks.
On the making of a girl nerd
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: On the making of a girl nerd
#62Anyone 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.
The College Board Advanced Placement exam for Computer Science has used Java for several years now. See http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/ap-c... I'm not saying that's a good idea, just that the practice is fairly common. I think they're nuts.
There is a CS course taught in Java in my high school, but the prerequisite teaches Netlogo, Scheme and Python. Schools teaching APCS should definitely consider having a prerequisite intro course if they have the resources to do so.
Re: On the making of a girl nerd
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's because MIT is up-front about expecting their CS freshmen to come in with programming experience.
Re: On the making of a girl nerd
#64Is 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…
It is obviously not proposing 'watering down' anything. All it recommends is a recognition that people come to college with very different degrees of experience and that it can be intimidating and offputting to the less experienced. As there is a gender difference operating here best recognize it and address it at the curriculum level.
Re: On the making of a girl nerd
#65Python is great, but I recommend that schools should start programming classes with Unity3D. Within the first class you can have objects with physics bouncing off of each other, and by the end of the course you can have a legitimate game to play (that can even be sent to your phone or tablet). The "javascript" variant is fairly straightforward and if you take it far enough can be quite powerful. At first the students…
no no no no no no no no no I cannot stress this strongly enough, _NO_. You need to walk before you can run and it is of NO BENEFIT to the student to hide programming behind a fancy UI with fun results before they know what is going on. Let's be clear here, I am not against Unity. But I'm definitely against Unity for teaching how to program. The "strength" you exemplify about having unity doing physics in the first le…
Frankly, I think that getting people excited about programming and learning that they can create something actually cool is the most important part of their first introduction.
I took a course in high school that started with the nuts and bolts. I did fine because I already knew some basics, but most of my classmates struggled. They learned that programming is hard and no fun and in the end you've pushed some lines of text around. Most of them barely passed and will never touch code again.
For a serious university level CS course? Sure, start with Python and explain how the basic nuts and bolts work. Trying to get young people excited? I think it's worth considering other options.
How many of us really started out programming learning the basic concepts in a structured environment? I understand your point, but I think that to be so dismissive of the enjoyment and excitement factor is inappropriate.
Re: On the making of a girl nerd
#66Is 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…
It is obviously not proposing 'watering down' anything. All it recommends is a recognition that people come to college with very different degrees of experience and that it can be intimidating and offputting to the less experienced. As there is a gender difference operating here best recognize it and address it at the curriculum level.
As there is a gender difference operating here...
If the set of less qualified people did not display a gender difference, would it be acceptable to let the weaker ones fail/quit/be intimidated?
Re: On the making of a girl nerd
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bill…
Yep, it's definitely worthy of discussion IMO. Someone else apparently disagrees, since my post got modded down to -1. :-)
Re: On the making of a girl nerd
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prior to that it was C++. I think they're actually moving in the right direction.
Compare Hello, World! in the two languages, in terms of new concepts that need to be known to understand it. In C++ you need to know about including and cout. In Java you've got all that class, public, static, blah blah nonsense.
When I took AP CS in C++, unfortunately, the finer details of iostream took up an inordinate portion of the class, which was particularly useless because iostream is really weird in a lot of ways (e.g. the stateful format specifiers sort of mixed in with the data being output). The part that wasn't taken up by that was taken up by memorizing some STL syntax.
Fortunately I actually taught myself programming in HS by writing mIRC scripts so I could do cool automation stuff in my spare time, and I had learned a little earlier in some kind of Logo course targeted at elementary-age kids. If it were up to that high-school C++ course to get me into computers, though, I would definitely not have done so...
Re: On the making of a girl nerd
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
no no no no no no no no no I cannot stress this strongly enough, _NO_. You need to walk before you can run and it is of NO BENEFIT to the student to hide programming behind a fancy UI with fun results before they know what is going on. Let's be clear here, I am not against Unity. But I'm definitely against Unity for teaching how to program. The "strength" you exemplify about having unity doing physics in the first le…
Frankly, I think that getting people excited about programming and learning that they can create something actually cool is the most important part of their first introduction. I took a course in high school that started with the nuts and bolts. I did fine because I already knew some basics, but most of my classmates struggled. They learned that programming is hard and no fun and in the end you've pushed some lines o…
Showing them what you can do, and teaching them using the environment, are two very different things.
Re: On the making of a girl nerd
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree that those two girls were unfairly weeded out of math, and we need to prevent that.
My point was that that teacher either needs to take a different attitude towards life, or get weeded out of the system herself. Why? Because her attitude will get impressed not just on girls attempting to enter predominantly male spaces, but upon all students that she interacts with.