131–140 of 193 posts
Wow! What an awesome critique. I'm in awe. First off, rather than just saying Khan Academy missed the point, Mr. Victor goes over in extreme detail with full examples with ideas on how to do it better. Second, he really went into some detail about how to think about things. Not just the solutions but ideas and ways of thinking to come up with better solutions. Third, he's set the bar for critiques higher than I've ev…
Couple random thoughts: 1. Is Bret Victor now the Linus of cutting-edge programming environments? 2. I don't have enough experience with Light Table or the Khan Academy environment to know whether Khan is just a first step on the way to something like Bret's vision, or more of a diversion. I was fairly impressed with the Khan env in my limited time with it. 3. I HATE telling people they shouldn't speak their mind and…
Not to take away from Bret's ideas, because they're great, but here are my responses. 1. I'd say that there's a significant difference between Bret and Linus. Specifically, when Linus believes that developers need better tools, we get git. When Bret believes developers need better tools, we get... blog posts and videos showing faked functionality. Now, that's not to say this won't change in the future. But, as of rig…
There are many reasons, none of which need to be justified to the public, as to why a person may turn down an opportunity.
His article made a short criticism of KA missing the forest for the trees and then provided a very long and detailed analysis of ways to improve it. For free. So everyone benefits.
I suspect the videos in his article were not dummies, mocks or faked, but actual working code. If you visit his website you will see a mind numbing amount of examples and demonstrations in the same vein and length as the article. The effort required to fake these would be truly enormous. Again, his reasons for not releasing code don't need to be justified to us.
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I agree, and would add that Brett Victor is pointing out what he perceives to be valid flaws with the method Khan Academny uses to teach programming (live coding environments, javascript, and processing languages, which other teaching products happen to use as well). He is not criticizing Khan Academy as a whole directly, as the quality or lack thereof of Khan Academy itself is never brought into question or even dis…
> Brett Victor is pointing out what he perceives to be valid flaws Where are the numbers? Where's the testing? Where's the proof that his proposed changes are more effective in teaching a new programmer? Validity comes through numbers, proof, and evidence.
In this case, I believe that a professional/experienced educator who has tried teaching introductory programming can, given their own experiences, relate, understand, and build on the concepts in the article to improve their own teaching and understanding of teaching/learning introductory programming. This is sometimes called communicative generalization (see Smaling: http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/2_1/html/smaling.htm... ).
For example, to me, as a computer science teacher in high school, I recognize a lot of the issues discussed in the article. Reading the article I am able to link these issues and solutions to my experiences in class and decide to what extent it is credible and trustworthy. Furthermore, and more importantly, I can more easily apply results this kind of research in my daily practice than I can results of (rigorous) quantitative research as that almost always is taken out of context and ' clinically' due to fixing variables that aren't fixed in real life situations (i.e. the classroom, the students (holistic), environment).
Beautiful and inspirational, and yet... Sometimes becoming able to hold the 'invisible state' in memory is the skill to learn. Consider the 'dual N-back' drilling which seems to improve working memory, and then also (by some studies) other testable fluid intelligence. The whole point is holding more and more hidden state in your mind. (To 'show the state' would defeat the purpose of the game.) Similarly, sometimes st…
Wow! What an awesome critique. I'm in awe. First off, rather than just saying Khan Academy missed the point, Mr. Victor goes over in extreme detail with full examples with ideas on how to do it better. Second, he really went into some detail about how to think about things. Not just the solutions but ideas and ways of thinking to come up with better solutions. Third, he's set the bar for critiques higher than I've ev…
I totally agree. Check out the rest of his site too, he is a genius.
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Like the ones I mentioned.
You didn't mention any VPLs. I would throw in a few...ThingLab, AgentSheets, LabView, Prograph, Fabrik, and so on. These were the original live languages.
But why do you think liveness requires visual programming? I see them as pretty much orthogonal.
Separately, when I see "visual programming language" I see "unusual programming language". When language features become normal (like 2D syntax in Python/haskell), then we stop calling them visual. A great deal of visual features are just alternative ways of structuring text, ways of constraining syntax, or ways of constructing high dimensional (and therefore non-visual) graphs. To a large extent, all programming languages are visual.
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You didn't mention any VPLs. I would throw in a few...ThingLab, AgentSheets, LabView, Prograph, Fabrik, and so on. These were the original live languages.
Self is certainly one. http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/programming-... But why do you think liveness requires visual programming? I see them as pretty much orthogonal. Separately, when I see "visual programming language" I see "unusual programming language". When language features become normal (like 2D syntax in Python/haskell), then we stop calling them visual. A great deal of visual features are ju…
Liveness doesn't require visual, of course, but that's where liveness first shows up in history (SketchPad, along with directness). I go into some of the history in my own paper on the topic (http://lamp.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07dead.pdf).