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New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

#41

Post by pbz »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #17
humanfromearth wrote: post #4

At my high-school in Romania we silently eliminated religion (yeah, surprised?), philosophy, 1 lesson of geography, 1 lesson of french and maybe something else.. and at the end we got 2 cs theory lessons and 6 full lessons of coding in the lab per week. We all had a linux shell on the school's server and most used vim to code C with gcc and makefiles. That had a lot to do with what kind of programmer I am today even…

Religion class aside, it seems a loss to do away with geography, philosophy and foreign languages. I love that you guys had a shell and learned so many great tools, but I think programming is also enhanced by being exposed to many non-CS topics.

Don't worry, they drill more geography in you before high school than they do here throughout high school. Teaching foreign languages starts from kindergarten. By high school if you're inclined and had good teachers you should know enough to have an ok conversation in at least two different languages. Plus you get exposed to so much to English / Spanish (you hear the original soundtrack for every movie for example) that you could learn a lot just from listening. I'm not sure about philosophy though, that would be a loss.(salutari)

Re: New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

#42

Post by yummyfajitas »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #17
humanfromearth wrote: post #4

At my high-school in Romania we silently eliminated religion (yeah, surprised?), philosophy, 1 lesson of geography, 1 lesson of french and maybe something else.. and at the end we got 2 cs theory lessons and 6 full lessons of coding in the lab per week. We all had a linux shell on the school's server and most used vim to code C with gcc and makefiles. That had a lot to do with what kind of programmer I am today even…

Religion class aside, it seems a loss to do away with geography, philosophy and foreign languages. I love that you guys had a shell and learned so many great tools, but I think programming is also enhanced by being exposed to many non-CS topics.

Compare unemployment rates in geography, philosophy and foreign languages. We need more CS people. We don't need more philosophers.

(Though admittedly, knowledge of English or German might be very useful if you are coming from Romania.)

Re: New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

#43

Post by rgoddard »

jrockway wrote: post #8

I'm not sure it's a great idea to get so focused at such an early age. There's a lot to learn about the world when you're 14, and it might be good to explore a wide range of topics. (I personally took most of my "real" classes in high school, so by the time I got to college, I had an idea of what I wanted to do. After going to college for a year, I realized my needs would not be met in that way. But deciding at 20 is…

Conversely, if a student thinks this is something they want to do, and find out this is not what they want, better to do that sooner rather then later. Cheaper to do it this way then in college.

Re: New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

#45

Post by darien »

seer wrote: post #38

I am actually astonished that this is the first time something like this is tried in the US. And I also don't understand the negative comments here in HN - most of you guys probably had a passion for computers at even earlier age and would have enjoyed this kind of school greatly. Here In the Sofia (the capital of Bulgaria) this is long established practice - we have loosely specialized schools and students decide wh…

Specialized High Schools already exist in NYC. I attended Murry Bertraum for Business Careers (in downtown manhattan) and took computer science electives in QBASIC, Fortran, and Java. This was in 2004 - when obviously Qbasic and Fortran had nothing to do with the internet - but that's the education system for you. There is also Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science.

Re: New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

#46

Post by rgrieselhuber »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #42
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion class aside, it seems a loss to do away with geography, philosophy and foreign languages. I love that you guys had a shell and learned so many great tools, but I think programming is also enhanced by being exposed to many non-CS topics.

Compare unemployment rates in geography, philosophy and foreign languages. We need more CS people. We don't need more philosophers. (Though admittedly, knowledge of English or German might be very useful if you are coming from Romania.)

> We don't need more philosophers.

Agreed but imagine how boring CS would be if people were ignorant of all of those other subjects.

Re: New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

#47

Post by bitslayer »

jrockway wrote: post #8

I'm not sure it's a great idea to get so focused at such an early age. There's a lot to learn about the world when you're 14, and it might be good to explore a wide range of topics. (I personally took most of my "real" classes in high school, so by the time I got to college, I had an idea of what I wanted to do. After going to college for a year, I realized my needs would not be met in that way. But deciding at 20 is…

It is probably not for everyone. But for 100 lucky students, I bet this will be just what they need. My son, who incidentally will be in 9th grade next year, has never had any interests beyond computers. Maybe it's time to move to NY.

Re: New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

#48

Post by postfuturist »

I'm so jealous of people who had the opportunity to take CS classes in high school (none at mine). I've seriously considered volunteering to teach intro CS classes at local high schools, just to pay it forward, I guess. I'd done some BASIC and C programming by the time I entered high school, and I would have taken any programming or CS classes in a heartbeat.

Re: New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

#50

Post by [deleted] »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #42
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion class aside, it seems a loss to do away with geography, philosophy and foreign languages. I love that you guys had a shell and learned so many great tools, but I think programming is also enhanced by being exposed to many non-CS topics.

Compare unemployment rates in geography, philosophy and foreign languages. We need more CS people. We don't need more philosophers. (Though admittedly, knowledge of English or German might be very useful if you are coming from Romania.)

[deleted]
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