Khan Academy: Computer Science
khanacademy.org
Khan Academy: Computer Science
1–10 of 188 posts
Re: Khan Academy: Computer Science
#2That site is incredible and keeps getting better. Thanks for the post.
Re: Khan Academy: Computer Science
#3Pretty cool! He has to do discrete math / mathematical logic & foundations to fill out the 1st/2nd year of mathematics and most computer science math requirements next.
Re: Khan Academy: Computer Science
#4That's awesome, but I think it would be much more accessible for newbies if they included download links and installation steps. I have friends who might be interested in this for whom just the installation could be a daunting hurdle.
Re: Khan Academy: Computer Science
#5Interesting that he uses Python to teach the examples. Python is what I learned first.
Does anyone have an opinion on whether Ruby or another language is better suited for teaching basic programming concepts?
Re: Khan Academy: Computer Science
#6That's awesome, but I think it would be much more accessible for newbies if they included download links and installation steps. I have friends who might be interested in this for whom just the installation could be a daunting hurdle.
Agree.
To me the biggest hurdle in programming is not the programming itself but the sys-admin effort to setup a development environment.
Re: Khan Academy: Computer Science
#7That's awesome, but I think it would be much more accessible for newbies if they included download links and installation steps. I have friends who might be interested in this for whom just the installation could be a daunting hurdle.
Re: Khan Academy: Computer Science
#8Interesting that he uses Python to teach the examples. Python is what I learned first. Does anyone have an opinion on whether Ruby or another language is better suited for teaching basic programming concepts?
For starting out programmers, I think it really doesn't matter which language that's used, as long as the language supports strong type safety, the ability to create data structures, and, ideally, also has garbage collection. Java, Python, and Ruby all work for this. In a perfect world, the language would also support C-style pointers, but GC is more important feature for a brand new programmer.
Initially, the goal should be to learn primitive data structure concepts and usage(i.e. ints, char, strings, pointers, etc.). After that, they should learn more complex structures, like linked lists. These should be taught without referencing the built-in standard library structures. After that, simple sorting algorithms can be taught(including recursion), as well as OO concepts.
Teaching all of that in a GC language is nice, because it removes a lot of the memory management that starting out programmers always get caught up with. It lets the student concentrate more on the concepts than on tricky memory issues. That can be taught latter.
Re: Khan Academy: Computer Science
#9Interesting that he uses Python to teach the examples. Python is what I learned first. Does anyone have an opinion on whether Ruby or another language is better suited for teaching basic programming concepts?
Even though my main language is Ruby these days, I'd still prefer to teach Python, it's much more readable to non-programmers. Ruby has lots of weird short-cut syntax which just confuses newbies.
Re: Khan Academy: Computer Science
#10Interesting that he uses Python to teach the examples. Python is what I learned first. Does anyone have an opinion on whether Ruby or another language is better suited for teaching basic programming concepts?
For the nth time, it's not about the language. What ever gets you started is fine. Then you learn some more.