Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
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Re: Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
#2I don't disagree that co!outer science is a more powerful perspective to learn, do a fun substitution exercise and replace computer science with building a car. We can lament that people just don't appreciate the beauty of the design process or that people who design cars really "get" cars better than everyone else and that the people who manufacture the cars really hold the power, but at the end of the day some people just need to know how to drive them. In my analogy, there are way too many people taking the "public transportation" route; teach em to drive.
Re: Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
#3I don't disagree that co!outer science is a more powerful perspective to learn, do a fun substitution exercise and replace computer science with building a car. We can lament that people just don't appreciate the beauty of the design process or that people who design cars really "get" cars better than everyone else and that the people who manufacture the cars really hold the power, but at the end of the day some peop…
Yay! A car analogy :-)
I don't know where you're based, but in the UK learning to drive includes a moderately hard theory test. So, you do learn about stopping distances, why you should indicate, simple car maintenance etc.
Anyone can learn the basic mechanics of driving (right pedal go fast, left pedal for changing gears, turny thing to change direction) - but we should teach so much more than that.
Re: Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
#4Although I agree a broader scope is needed when teaching kids to "code", I feel there is a such a threat to digress and swing the learning pendulum in the other direction. Meaning that the kids never get filthy bugs on their hands but end up learning about Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship.
Sometimes it pays to dive right in and let them lead there own way out.
Re: Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
#5When you're building a skyscraper, you are not going to design every brick.
The basis of teaching children how to code is making them learn how to use code as a problem-solving tool. Like this, the sorting will not be important by itself, but as means to an end. As a way to achieve greater objectives.
And besides this reasoning, we have another: in CS, something is generally built on top of others. If you write a heapsort algorithm in C, you don't need to understand it's implementation in assembly. When I write my HTTP Applications I don't need to understand all the Network Layers beneath it. As I write this, I don't really understand the intricacies of Google Chrome and MacOS that make it possible. Am I ignorant? No. There is much thinking and learning to high level coding too. It's all about how complex your problem is and how you learn to apply logic to solve it.
Re: Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
#6As someone who has started learning coding, I don't think I can get interested in Compute Science by not learning to build things.
Re: Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
#7Computer science is to programming
as
physics is to civil engineering.
Re: Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
#8Although I agree a broader scope is needed when teaching kids to "code", I feel there is a such a threat to digress and swing the learning pendulum in the other direction. Meaning that the kids never get filthy bugs on their hands but end up learning about Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship. Sometimes it pays to dive right in and let them lead there own way out.
(In that spirit: "there their!")
Medical software is now clawing its way out of lots of bad software written by people with good domain knowledge and too little programming and CS chops. Really, the point should be to make sure the larger culture knows what it doesn't know.
Imagine if many financial institutions didn't fully understand their debt instruments...that would be bad, right? (2008) Well, many companies don't understand their technical debt, act like it's some kind of magic, and tell themselves it doesn't matter.
Unfortunately, it does.
Re: Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
#9While I agree that it's important to stress the differences between code and CS, I still believe that, at an High School level, it's better to teach how to code instead of CS.
Programming is a practical skill. It's easier to engage kids with it and it will probably be more useful to them in the future. It's hard enough to engage kids with practical stuff ("I'm never going to need X, I'm going to become a Y"). I just don't see most HS students interested in data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis.
I would rather see a bad programming course where the students actually learned something instead of a good computer science course that most of them completed by memorizing exercises, cheating, etc.
Re: Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
#10Don't these guys realize that even out in the real world there are large numbers of programmers who aren't computer scientists. They have code running in production as we sit here and debate the merits of teaching children what will become an essential skill in the future. I work with people who will never need to recall from memory how to write a quicksort yet they've been collecting paychecks as developers for years. I can never understand the backlash against teaching people something. Aren't we all for abstraction and encapsulation? You don't hear doctors complaining that people are learning how to eat healthy but not learning how all their internal organs work.