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Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

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Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#51

Post by jcgrillo »

robrenaud wrote: post #48
jcgrillo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 best learning was difficult, whole mind encompassing, and incredibly fun. If you can get college students idle brains curiously contemplating the how and why of the subject, that's when the tuition is really worth it.

I completely agree. The only things I consider fun are also "hard", "uncomfortable", and "unpleasant". Otherwise it's just boring.

Another way to say it is "rewarding".

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#52

Post by jcgrillo »

ycombinatrix wrote: post #39
jcgrillo wrote: post #2

The disease must have jumped the river from M.I.T.

i think it is coming from industry

My geography of that region is dated, but when I worked in industry there I was north if M.I.T., so it's plausible industry could be patient zero.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#53

Post by ben7799 »

The new curriculum might be worse but I'm not sure how a 4th year undergraduate should be too sure of themselves when second guessing the department.

My undergraduate degree is from RPI, I have worked with many NU grads, they are often very good, but there have been many eye opening moments for me with them in terms of how different the material they learned was and what was left for graduate school when it comes other the core mathematical fundamentals of computer science. To be fair I've run into engineers from other schools that leave all of this to graduate school too. My first internship I shared a cubicle with a graduate student at Boston University. She was taking a graduate course on algorithm proofs and the course used the same book that we had used in the major weed out class that we had in the spring of Freshman year.

"Program Design" has changed almost as often as popular programming languages during my career. Almost none of those core mathematical fundamentals have changed at all.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#54

Post by fireburning »

ramses0 wrote: post #46
deactivatedexp wrote: post #32

i'm a dropout just do horrible coding for fun can anyone explain why CS programs are adamant about not teaching on the job skills? like databases, web, embedded, security plus theory

I graduated with a degree in CS. Checking back with my university they'd added a degree in Software Engineering. CS (traditionally) is more about algorithms, limits, growth. There's a bunch of complexity in even just understanding and calculating what a computer can do. The Software Engineering degree makes so much sense if you're studying about how libraries can be tied together, upgraded, unit/integration testing,…

sorry if this sounds dumb I don't have any formal education why is there a distinction?

when i hear computer science i hear the study of computers that in my head means software, hardware, and theory it's like having doctors that study humans theoretically and others that do surgery

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#55

Post by analog31 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #31
pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

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 ju…

for non-majors isn't radical. "Stats for business" "PE for physicists" Why isn't "programming for sciences" not a thing?

"PE for physicists." Touche. ;-)

Dating myself, my college had Pascal for CS majors, and FORTRAN for physicists. The FORTRAN class was math heavy, and we had a higher level course in process control as well, plus we all took the math class in numerical analysis.

When my daughter was in college, it was Java and Python. She took Java. I had suggested to her that she could easily keep up with the CS students, which she did.

I very much favor better training in programming for scientists. Taught by a scientist. The "intro to Matlab" that many students take is really too lightweight. Also, as for languages becoming obsolete, the disciplines that I learned in the 1980s are still of value today even if the languages have changed.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#56

Post by tptacek »

Teaching object-oriented design as fundamental computer science seems like it would have been an odd decision for 2025. I looked up the class syllabus, and it seems to have been taught in Java (fine) and makes extensive reference to design patterns (not fine).

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#57

Post by [deleted] »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

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 ju…

[deleted]

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#58

Post by theonething »

mjdiloreto wrote: post #43

The end of an era. This is nothing less than a travesty honestly. The current (now former) curriculum at NEU was uniquely exceptional, and now it will be conformingly adequate. Anyone who complained about the difficulty or lack of "job-market applicability" of the Fundies classes entirely missed the forest for the trees. The point is the design _process_, and using Racket forced this. It also demonstrated the magic t…

Too bad there isn't an online version that anyone can take.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#60

Post by userbinator »

I haven't seen many CS curricula start bottom-up with things like digital logic, yet the best programmers I've worked with all started around there and then went upwards --- many of them were self-taught, and although I realise that introduces some selection bias, I have also worked with others who were self-taught but started with some HLL instead, but they didn't have quite the same performance.
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