Language. Programming 2. Programming 3. What you should know before starting a doctorate. A few days ago an interesting article on Graduate schools circulated around the web. The article suggested that Graduate school has many of the features of a cult and that some people staying on to undertake postgraduate studies almost needed to be deprogrammed until they understood that there was value in life outside the Academy. Here (just in case you don’t have the stamina to read a short pithy well-written article) are the first two paragraphs: Several years ago, the professional career counselor Margaret Newhouse wrote an essay for The Chronicle called “Deprogramming From the Academic Cult.”
Newhouse argued that graduate school in the humanities indoctrinates its students into believing that they are failures if they do not remain inside the ivory tower, even if there are no suitable academic jobs for them. A little under seven years ago I left a doctorate in Classics that I’d been undertaking at Bristol University. Masters aside then, what of the research degree? What Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why? By Bjarne Stroustrup Communications of the ACM, Vol. 53 No. 1, Pages 40-42 10.1145/1629175.1629192 Comments (12) Computer science must be at the center of software systems development.
If it is not, we must rely on individual experience and rules of thumb, ending up with less capable, less reliable systems, developed and maintained at unnecessarily high cost. We need changes in education to allow for improvements of industrial practice. Back to Top The Problem In many places, there is a disconnect between computer science education and what industry needs. Famous CS professor (proudly): "We don't teach programming; we teach computer science. " Industrial manager: "They can't program their way out of a paper bag. " In many cases, they are both right, and not just at a superficial level. Another CS professor: "I never code. " Another industrial manager: "We don't hire CS graduates; it's easier to teach a physicist to program than to teach a CS graduate physics.
" The Academia/Industry Gap Conclusion. My lazy American students. IT WAS the kind of student conference I hate. “I’ll do better,’’ my student told me, leaning forward in his chair. “I know I’ve gotten behind this semester, but I’m going to turn things around. Would it be OK if I finished all my uncompleted work by Monday?’’ I sat silent for a moment.
“Yes. A few weeks later, I would conduct a nearly identical conversation with two other students. By the time students are in college, habits can be tough to change. Teaching in college, especially one with a large international student population, has given me a stark - and unwelcome - illustration of how Americans’ work ethic often pales in comparison with their peers from overseas. My “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have - despite language barriers - generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants. Too many American students simply lack the basics. “OK,’’ he said. Lisp and Smalltalk are dead: It’s C all the way down. August 14, 2009 at 12:09 pm Georgia Tech’s College of Computing is now considering a proposal to remove Smalltalk from the required curriculum in favor of C++.
When I got here in 1993, we taught Pascal (mostly) and had required courses in C, Lisp, and Smalltalk. The faculty explicitly valued that students see more than one school of programming thought. I took over the Smalltalk-using course from John Schilling and Richard LeBlanc, and moved it from ObjectWorks to Squeak. When we moved to semesters in 1999, Lisp got dropped, and we’d moved from Pascal to Java as our main teaching language.
Why drop Smalltalk? It’s reasonable to teach a course on object-oriented analysis, design, and programming in C++ rather than Smalltalk. Richard Gabriel has been thinking a lot about the C-ness of our discipline. Gabriel contrasts two design philosophies, the MIT/Stanford philosophy (which he calls “the right thing“) and the “New Jersey” C/UNIX philosophy (which he calls “worse is better”). Like this: College: An Overpriced Monopoly. In a recent post here at Open Salon, Joanne Jacobs writes about “The college payoff: $300,000 over 40 years.” In her piece she makes the claim that going to college is good by comparing the cost of going to college to the expected return. Maybe. But what if the college market turns out to be like the housing market—overpriced and awaiting a crash?
Oh, I don't mean that you're going to regret getting educated. But it seems to me like it's time for a price revolution and you might be sad you paid such a ridiculous price if you could have gotten an equivalent education for a lot less. So don't be lulled into thinking that the present system is the only possibility. The traditional system may have stood for a long time, but few things are rock solid in the modern world, and as prices climb higher and higher, at a rate far outpacing inflation, it becomes less and less credible that the present system can survive without challenge. Why doesn't it fix itself? What's the point? Lifelong Learning. The Calculus Trap. The Calculus Trap by Richard Rusczyk Click here for a printable version of this article You love math and want to learn more.
But you’re in ninth grade and you’ve already taken nearly all the math classes your school offers. They were all pretty easy for you and you’re ready for a greater challenge. For an avid student with great skill in mathematics, rushing through the standard curriculum is not the best answer. Developing a broader understanding of mathematics and problem solving forms a foundation upon which knowledge of advanced mathematical and scientific concepts can be built. Another danger of the calculus trap is social. In addition to this intellectual enrichment, the social enrichment of being amongst like-minded peers is invaluable. Many students get stuck in the calculus trap because they believe it’s their only option. Were we smarter 100 years ago..? I have been rereading the legislative history of the 1909 Copyright Act. I have come to the conclusion that 100 years ago we were smarter about copyright, about disruptive technologies, about intellectual property, monopolies and network effects than we are today.
At least, the legislative hearings were much smarter. The hearings I am looking at took place in 1906 — thanks to the wonder of Google books you can read them yourself, if you are really nerdy. There are lots of delights here. There is John Philip Sousa (yes, the one who wrote the march that forms the Monty Python theme music) popping up again and again to make his point.. The thing that Sousa (and some other American composers) and the music publishers were most upset about was the fact that copyright covered printing and public performance, but did not cover the mechanical reproduction involved in cutting a roll for a player piano or recording a disk or a cylinder for a phonograph or gramophone.
Why America is flunking science. In the recent Tom Hanks/Ron Howard film “Angels & Demons,” science sets the stage for destruction and chaos. A canister of antimatter has been stolen from CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — and hidden in the Vatican, set to explode right as a new pope is about to be selected. Striving to make these details as realistic as possible on screen, Howard and his film crew visited CERN, used one of its physicists as a science consultant, and devoted meticulous care to designing the antimatter canister that Hanks’ character, Robert Langdon, and his sexy scientist colleague, Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), wind up searching for.
But there was nothing they could do about the gigantic impossibility at the center of the plot. As its Web site attests, CERN has been forced to develop some pretty sophisticated P.R. tools in recent years. The experience of CERN is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today. What do we learn from this curriculum about science? How high school students start thinking about code. July 5, 2009 at 10:45 pm My colleague Amy Bruckman and her student Betsy diSalvo have a really great project going on this summer, called Glitch.
Betsy is interested in how African-American males engage with technology and why so few pursue computing as a career. She notes that African-American males play video games more than any other gender-ethnicity demographic groups, and yet are one of the most under-represented groups in computing majors and careers. To address this discrepancy, Betsy and Amy are training a group of African-American teen age boys to be game testers, and in so doing, getting them to engage with how the games they love are built. Amy and Betsy are teamed up with Dr. Charles Meadows of Morehouse College, who is teaching the teenagers how to program in Alice. Betsy wanted them to see some textual code, too, to get them to see how programs like their games are created. I’ve found it fascinating to work with the Glitch guys. The result was really interesting. Like this: What Is a Master’s Degree Worth? (Credit: Chip East/Reuters) Room for Debate recently published two forums on the burdens of student loans, and heard from a lot of former students, parents, professors and others who shared personal horror stories, blunt advice and critical observations about higher education.
A number of economists and education researchers say that the student debt problem, while real, has been overblown by the press and loan-forgiveness advocates, and that most students do not graduate with too much debt. But the debate presents difficult questions for young people, who face the most difficult economy since the Great Depression. Many have decided to go to graduate school, to wait out the storm. How do students know if an M.A. is worth it or not? Mark C. The Education Bubble Mark C. The next bubble to burst will be the education bubble. Colleges are on the prowl for new sources of income. This is hardly a prescription for financial success. And now the economy makes matters worse. The Value of an M.A. How do you spark off an interest in maths when the curriculum se.
My son is 13. In his English lessons, he spends time learning the grammar and vocabulary of the language - basic necessities for anyone leaving school. But he has also been exposed to some of the great works of literature that have been created using these building blocks. He has already read Richard III and George Eliot's Silas Marner. He probably didn't understand the intricate complexities and subtleties of these great works, but he was excited by the contact with such stimulating literature. In mathematics, he has also been learning the basic grammar and vocabulary of the world of numbers. Percentages, long division, some basic algebra and geometry. Techniques that are also regarded as core skills that every child should leave school with. The teachers are required to teach a utilitarian and unadventurous curriculum that leaves them no room to explore the creative side of the subject.
When I was 13, I hadn't caught the mathematical bug yet. I'm a maths nerd. 5 puzzles for pupils. A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education. A former schoolbook editor parses the politics of educational publishing. Some years ago, I signed on as an editor at a major publisher of elementary school and high school textbooks, filled with the idealistic belief that I'd be working with equally idealistic authors to create books that would excite teachers and fill young minds with Big Ideas. Not so. I got a hint of things to come when I overheard my boss lamenting, "The books are done and we still don't have an author! I must sign someone today! " Every time a friend with kids in school tells me textbooks are too generic, I think back to that moment. "Who writes these things? " Textbooks are a core part of the curriculum, as crucial to the teacher as a blueprint is to a carpenter, so one might assume they are conceived, researched, written, and published as unique contributions to advancing knowledge.
In fact, most of these books fall far short of their important role in the educational scheme of things. Welcome to the Machine But wait. Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python. In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism. Math for the Layman. MATH for the LAYMAN Table of Contents Preface 1: Numbers 2: Computer Use and Experimentation 3: Graphs and Visualization 4: Polynomials 5: Power Series 6: Slope and Derivative 7: Growth and Decay 8: Vibrations 9: Inverses and Equations 10: Language and Grammar 11: Proofs 12: Anagrams and Permutations 13: Logic and Sets 14: Properties of Functions 15: Linear Vector Functions 16: Polynomials and Number Systems 17: Algorithms 18: Anti-Derivative and Integral 19: Complex Numbers and the Exponential Family 20: Further Topics Kenneth E.
Preface In 1936, Lancelot Hogben published his still-popular Mathematics for the Million [1], stating his objective as follows: The view which we shall explore is that mathematics is the language of size, shape and order and that it is an essential part of the equipment of an intelligent citizen to understand this language. Hogben continues with: The fact is that modern mathematics does not borrow much from antiquity. 1A. 1B. 1C. 1D. 1E. 1F. 1G. 1H. 1I. 1J. 1K. 1L. 1A. 1B. 1C. 1D. The bipolar Lisp programmer. Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck? « Better Beginnings: how to start a presentation, book, article... | Main | Two simple words of passion... » Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck?
If you studied math, science, or engineering at a four-year college in the US, much of what you learned is useless, forgotten, or obsolete. All that money, all that time, all that wasted talent. If all we lost were a few years, no big deal. Toward the end of his life, legendary mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked 100 of the top scientists of his time how they did whatever it was that they did (math, physics, etc.) We are in sooooo much trouble. What experts use to do their work are the things we don't teach.
And what do we do to try and improve things? Our educational institutions--at every level--need drastic changes or we're all screwed. The Waterfall Model of education is failing like never before. I'll end this with two quotes: From Jason Fried:"Hire curious people. Posted by Kathy on November 2, 2006 | Permalink. Code University - Google Code.