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Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

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Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#23

Post by hitekker »

jcgrillo wrote: post #14
dickfickling wrote: post #4

I attended Northeastern from 2010-2013. Fundies (the freshman-level functional programming courses) was fundamental (ha) to my growth as a software developer. It taught me how to reason about data and how to design programs (the literal name of the textbook). I know a lot of students hated it—frankly those were mostly the students that it seemed were only doing computer science programs because they’d heard they coul…

> I know a lot of students hated it That's a good thing . I don't know whether your assertion about the breakdown between "real nerds" and the other camp is accurate or not, but I think this point stands on its own regardless--learning is hard . It's uncomfortable . It's unpleasant . If it isn't, you're not being pushed hard enough. So what's the point of asking students how they feel about it? Why make strategic dec…

My take: if a given task is not fun, then it is work. People on average do not enjoy work. They do not like doing work, let alone doing it well. Training kids to do work well, without any pleasure, necessitates heavy accountability enforced by management, which brings a slew of its own requirements and complexities.

Schools already handle many cross-competing concerns across stakeholders (PTA, Taxpayers, Town Government, State Government), so I suspect they would want to reduce their enforcement & oversight load. They'll choose a teaching style that makes everyone happy or at least complacent, even if they know "fun is not learning".

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#25

Post by herdrick »

herdrick wrote: post #22

Matthias Felleisen, architect (I think) of the current curriculum, explains to a hypothetical skeptical university administrator the virtues of it: https://felleisen.org/matthias/Thoughts/py.html

(... in the style of his The Little Schemer et al. books)

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#26

Post by pclmulqdq »

I went to Caltech when they were contemplating similar things in the CS curriculum, although the normal curriculum was less radical than Northeastern's seems to be.

There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Teaching algorithm design in that class is not particularly useful to a biologist who just wants to be able to cobble something together to analyze some data (usually in Python). As a result, the non-computer-scientists and non-software-engineers at the school would rather have a curriculum that is more "practical" and directly applies to research (or later class projects) the students might be doing.

Some time not far in the future, we are going to accept that this is not the same thing at all as computer science and give the computer scientists a curriculum that is a lot heavier on math and theory while adding elective or core courses for non-major students on programming. That will end the compromised state that intro CS courses currently sit in. Right now, there isn't enough teaching talent to run those non-core courses (because that talent is earning the big bucks doing something else).

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#27

Post by sorawee »

wombatpm wrote: post #12
SolarNet wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you haven't read the article (or used racket) without telling me. > I believe that an intro course should get students coding since the first major hurdle is learning how to construct any kind of program at all. The switch to a more "employable" language isn't going to make education worse. None of this is the issue at hand. The switch to python is because industry uses it. The article correctly makes the poi…

Python supports imperative, OO and functional programming paradigms. And to start you can use any text editor, an IDE is not required. In fact you can start working in the REPL right away, in which case you need a terminal and the command “Python”.

To quote the above person: "tell me you haven't read the article without telling me".

You thought that supporting multiple "programming paradigms" is a nice thing, but it's the opposite for teaching beginning student. Experienced programmers want expressivity/customization/choices to do whatever they want. That's not what newbies need when they get stuck on an assignment.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#28

Post by Jarwain »

wombatpm wrote: post #12
SolarNet wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you haven't read the article (or used racket) without telling me. > I believe that an intro course should get students coding since the first major hurdle is learning how to construct any kind of program at all. The switch to a more "employable" language isn't going to make education worse. None of this is the issue at hand. The switch to python is because industry uses it. The article correctly makes the poi…

Python supports imperative, OO and functional programming paradigms. And to start you can use any text editor, an IDE is not required. In fact you can start working in the REPL right away, in which case you need a terminal and the command “Python”.

All of that except for working in the terminal, could probably be considered higher level

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#29

Post by bmitc »

This is a really frustrating development, and I'm not sure I have the energy to explain why because it should be obvious and because the negative emotions of years of dealing with stuff like this.

My main complaints border around: there's no art in anything anymore in that unless you're doing the lowest common denominator you are doing it wrong, companies show more and more success in influencing others (namely universities) to be their training centers for them, and that universities should be about learning and exploration and not subservience to culture.

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