CS for All

This is only "CS for All" Harvey Mudd students; I don't think real computer illiteracy problem there.

> There's a huge population of people who simply cannot effectively use a computer. Can we fix that first?

If you mean to shift topic from what "CS for All" means in the title to "CS for All in the world", obviously, that inherently requires solving Computer Literacy for all. So, yes, we can solve that first, if we can solve either at all.

If you mean "CS for All" in the sense actually used in the title, then, demonstrably, no. Since the source linked from the title is the solution to "CS for All" in the sense used in the title, and yet, as you note, Computer Literacy for all (in the broader sense of "all" that you wish it solved for) is not solved.

That said, this course suffers from so many CS courses.

1. It's too wordy!

2. As usual, I don't like the layout.

3. Funnel your subjects. (I'll give that a B.)

4. Funnel your paragraphs, or eliminate most of them?

5. Most people(students) find this material extremely dry. Introductory books should be "tight"! They should go through numerous edits? Take out every non-essential word?

6. I haven't yet read an introductory CS text that gets it right?

7. As to exercises? Try to use excercises that the student might have some immediate interest in, or can use in their daily life? For example, instead of some cute game example, show the student how a simple reminder application is programmed? How Google works?(just the basics). Or, how their spellcheck program works?

8. If I was going to write a introductory computer course, after explaining the hardware(that's usually sitting in front of them), I would explain an how operating systems stores their information--"The use, and location of Folders."

I would want my students competent in the Command Line before we did any Programming. I would want them to know they can have two folders named the same, but located in different sections of the hard-drive. I would want them competent in finding them, and manipulating them.

I can say that I really appreciate what was done in CS110. I learned about a bunch of topics that would have been taught later on in other curriculums like recursion, graphs, lambda calculus, first class functions, and even implemented minmax. Granted, I took the pilot offering which has since been scaled down (lowest common denominator of student and such) but there were a lot of concepts which just couldn't have been taught efficiently with something like Java, which has a lot more syntax to learn before even being able to get to the meat of the course.

That said, the course is definitely not for everyone. People that taught themselves other languages before coming to UBC generally found it to be too easy at first, wrote the course off as being stupid, then started lagging slowly as time went on and more advanced topics got introduced. I've TAed the course a few times, and have seen that come up a lot. Also, of course, the people that just couldn't grasp the concepts in the course. But overall, it was a fairly well-attended class, with lots of people from across the school (it counted as as a computation course for Arts majors and was easier than Calc 3 :) ). Really cool to see the different ways people would approach a problem.

Well then we should speed it up somehow. People die due to shoddy writing and missing/unindexed/unsearchable paperwork by MDs. Revoke the licenses of those who refuse to join the 21st century.