We could start by teaching computing well... <http...
# linking-togetherm
Mariano Guerra
04/13/2020, 10:41 AM
We could start by teaching computing well... https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51644033
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Doug Moen
04/13/2020, 3:07 PMTeenagers are not children. If I were a teen, I'd evaluate this program on its merits, and enroll if I thought it was good value for money. My experience of high school is that it was day care for teenagers. It was an opportunity to socialize with other teenagers, but the courses were a big waste of time. I taught myself the things I was interested in outside of school: computer programming, relativity, quantum mechanics, aerodynamics, etc. I did sign up for a few tech courses outside of school, and join some tech clubs. If I was a teenager today, I would definitely be learning quantum computing, hanging out in a makerspace, etc, outside of school hours.
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Dan Cook
04/14/2020, 3:54 AMSomething does need to be done about education.
Flooding the world with mediocre developers is not great. But actually teaching programming for what it is and how to do it well, would make a big difference.
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Nick Smith
04/14/2020, 4:34 AMWe already suffer from a shortage of good CS/programming/engineering teachers at universities -- ones who have actually applied their own education to solve real problems. I can't imagine how we could start teaching high school students competently.
You could even argue that many software professionals are still in need of skill development. The whole discipline is a bit hacked together at the moment.
Nick Smith
04/14/2020, 4:55 AMMaybe that's a good reason why we should focus on high quality pre-prepared public educational materials, instead of high quality instructors. Then the only role of an instructor is to aid students in their engagement with the pre-prepared material.
At universities the educational material is typically something a lecturer or their TA came up with, and we can probably do a lot better than that. Online materials like Khan academy don't reach the bar either, because they mostly teach "language features", not problem-solving.
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Edward de Jong / Beads Project
04/17/2020, 9:18 PMGiven that Quantum computing is more like snake oil than an actual science, in that it promises far more than it delivers, it is absurd to propose such a thing. Quantum computing requires cooling items to under 1 degree above absolute zero, which is expensive, delicate, and given that any tangible utility is decades away in quantum computing, hardly an appropriate subject for schools which can barely handle material 2000 years old (ie. Geometry and Algebra).