Semi-OT: Why Kids Can't use Computers

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 01:01:08AM -0400, Paul King wrote:
> I can't speak for "bad teachers", since I have really been teaching senior
> math and qualified to teach both subject areas. Our school has never offered
> comp sci, being too small. In my experience there is a lot of student
> romanticism that precedes entry to computer science for the first time.
> There are people who want to write a killer Flash app first time out, and
> become dismayed when they find to their horror that it means learning
> ActionScript and going through a lot of OOP concepts, and that we should
> probably start with something easier to think about while covering some
> basic stuff like "if" statements and looping. And maybe even a function or
> two. 
> 
> Choices for a first teaching language vary wildly among teachers and
> institutions. I still recommend something procedural like Turing or Lazarus,
> but most teachers these days, afraid of losing students will surrender to
> Visual Basic, even though the latter is costly, but can arguably be massaged
> into a grade 10 teaching language (.NET is a little more iffy in Grade 10,
> IMO). I dislike their choice, but I understand that this is the common
> wisdom, due to pressure from administrators to keep the numbers of
> interested students up in their classrooms. Just the simple fact that VB has
> more cachet with students than Turing or Lazarus, even with its VB-like RAD
> GUI, is enough reason to reject such teaching languages.
> 
> Python has been suggested (and is the first language taught in many
> universities to those who are raw beginners), but IMO it plays too fast and
> loose with data types. Since knowing data types is taught in grade 10 for
> the first time, it wouldn't be a good idea to expect students to understand,
> let alone trace errors, in such code. The only way to go here and stick
> honestly to the Ministry objectives is to select a language that uses strict
> typing. Hence, my choices from the Pascal family. Languages like C, C++, and
> Python can be taught in Grade 11 or 12 once the basics are out of the way.

Waterloo starts with scheme, then moves to scheme and C for the next
course before getting into more complex things in the second year.

Even non CS majors still start with scheme before moving to python.

https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs135/prospective

Before that it used to be first year was java (for the first decade of
this century), and in the nineties they used pascal for the first year
courses (and modula 3 for the second year courses along with some scheme
and DLX assembly).

> I guess that the real problem here is that, while there are good and bad
> teachers in all subjects, computer science teaching is influenced by admin
> expectations that numbers of students have to be up to a certain level each
> September, student expectations that don't match the realities of the
> course, and the teacher's choice of teaching language (admin pressure to
> "keep numbers up" for class funding goes back to Mike Harris and the funding
> formula, which still prevails).

Perhaps they should be looking at some of the more modern designs for
teaching programming concepts, like scratch. (http://scratch.mit.edu/)

It is certainly aimed at kids, although perhaps not highschool level,
although if they really just want to make something cool quickly to start,
maybe it actually is the right kind of thing.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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