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...the absence of either: 1) Quirk-compatible implementations of old-school BASIC interpreters for modern machines, or 2) Relevant, currently usable example programs in children's math textbooks.

NOT the absence of "programming for kids".

Though, if you really thinking simple, instant-gratification, learning languages aren't available for young protoprogrammers today, might I suggest looking at StarLogo TNG (and its 2d relative, OpenStarLogo).

Also, a number of less education-focussed languages have many of the features that made BASIC accessible to young learners (an immediate interpreter environment, friendly vocabulary compared to, say, C's intimidating, punctuation-heavy syntax), like REBOL.

I can't see that there is a real problem here in terms of availability of suitable languages for learning.

1) what is a function

It's a named block of code that you can reference elsewhere, kind of like PRINT in Basic, only in Haskell, you can write your own.

2) what is the lambda calculus

Totally irrelevant. This is like saying you can't learn Basic without understanding Turing machines.

3) what is currying

Basically irrelevant again. Also, currying primarily seems to confuse people coming from other languages who want to write all their functions like this(a,b,c)

4) how functions are first class entities

You don't need to use higher order functions to write simple programs. However, the only reason I can see this being terribly confusing is if the child has already been indoctrinated by other languages where this is specifically not possible.

5) what are logical types
6) what are type classes

It is, again, quite possible to write simple programs without engaging in all the advanced features of the language, so your point falls very flat here.

7) what is garbage collection

Garbage collection is a feature that means they will never have to think about memory management (for small programs), just like in Basic.

8) what monads are (good luck on that one)

It's very unnecessary to understand what monads are in an abstract sense to actually use them. Tell me, how does knowing what monads are help you interpret this code:

do a
Boy. That's impossible to read without understanding category theory!

The point at which they start needing to know what monads are is the point at which they'd be writing fucked-up spaghetti in Basic. Might as well have them learn good technique.

It's also interesting you should point this out. I seem to recall someone in #haskell saying that they did, in fact, teach some Haskell to a grade school class, including some stuff about monads. It seems that kids are smarter than you (or at least, than you give them credit for).

9) what closures are

If we eliminated higher-order functions earlier, this is irrelevant. Otherwise, all they need to know is that if they create a function somewhere, it can use local identifiers. They don't need to know what closures are in general.

10) what is tail call optimization

Really? They need to know that term, and about optimization in a compiler?

It seems to me that Sussman does a pretty good job explaining the difference between tail-recursion and non tail-recursion in lecture 1b here, all within his substitution model of computing. You could do the same with Haskell. You don't think kids would understand the idea of a function call replacing the name with the content of the function? Kids must be dumb.

11) what is recursion

Recursion isn't hard, any more than loops are hard.

12) what an FFI is

Straight from the horse's ass.

I seem to recall MIT building a on legged hopping robot back in, oh... 1988. Sure, it doesn't look as "human" as toyota's leg, but toyota's doesn't seem any more impressive than MIT's. Maybe I'm missing the point.

Impressive? In the fact that I couldn't build one yes, but 4 centimeters? ehh. I have a wind-up plastic kangaroo that can do back flips, that didn't make slashdot's front page.

The last paragraph of the article ...Microsoft and Apple and all the big-time education-computerizing reformers of the MIT Media Lab are failing, miserably. For all of their high-flown education initiatives (like the "$100 laptop"), they seem bent on providing information consumption devices, not tools that teach creative thinking and technological mastery...

I thought I would be the one to propose Python first, but since it's been done already...

How about MIT Scheme? Nice, easy to use, powerful.

Besides, it also gives a great theoretical approach to computing.

I really can't complain about the sentiment of wanting to provide computers for all. Why do I get the feeling though that the only reason the government wants to give people there access is so that they can find more ways to pull mone into Chinas society. Regardess, $150 PCs isnt suh a great deal.

We've all known MIT has been working on the $100 laptop project for some time. http://laptop.media.mit.edu/

A 500Mhx chip, etc... It might be inadequate for most programs that arent specifically made to work with it, but for a little more you'd think they could add some of those basic features to it and still undercut a $150 pricetag.

But the MIT lecture videos are free.

Newtonian Physics: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFal l1999/VideoLectures/index.htm
Electricity and Magnetism: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity- and-MagnetismSpring2002/VideoLectures/index.htm
Vibrations and Waves: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-03Fall-2004/Vi deoLectures/index.htm

You can almost certainly find more by poking around the MIT OpenCourseWare website. The lectures linked above by Prof. Lewin, however, are particularly good!

But the MIT lecture videos are free.

Newtonian Physics: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFal l1999/VideoLectures/index.htm
Electricity and Magnetism: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity- and-MagnetismSpring2002/VideoLectures/index.htm
Vibrations and Waves: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-03Fall-2004/Vi deoLectures/index.htm

You can almost certainly find more by poking around the MIT OpenCourseWare website. The lectures linked above by Prof. Lewin, however, are particularly good!

But the MIT lecture videos are free.

Newtonian Physics: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFal l1999/VideoLectures/index.htm
Electricity and Magnetism: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity- and-MagnetismSpring2002/VideoLectures/index.htm
Vibrations and Waves: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-03Fall-2004/Vi deoLectures/index.htm

You can almost certainly find more by poking around the MIT OpenCourseWare website. The lectures linked above by Prof. Lewin, however, are particularly good!

all of it is free and under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license...

http://ocw.mit.edu/

Just two links:

http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

Consider this: video recording of Introduction to algorithms class, notes, exams, assignments, ... http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-046JFall-2005/LectureNotes/i ndex.htm

Free and apparentely available to everybody. Does somebody know other links to a projects that would be as good as this?

Just two links:

http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

Consider this: video recording of Introduction to algorithms class, notes, exams, assignments, ... http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-046JFall-2005/LectureNotes/i ndex.htm

Free and apparentely available to everybody. Does somebody know other links to a projects that would be as good as this?

The professor should be shot for being a profiteering asshole.

Just take a look at MIT's approach: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

Your rebuttal is a single example? Do they teach critical thinking there, too?

MIT has an ocean acoustics program. That at least used to deal to a large extent with submarine detection, with lots of military research money available. MIT also has an acoustics and vibration lab. And Amar Bose, who may well have designed your loud speakers, taught acoustics at MIT until his retirement in 2000. I took his intro acoustics course many years ago. I think that he may still teach a course. He is still listed in the MIT directory.

MIT has an ocean acoustics program. That at least used to deal to a large extent with submarine detection, with lots of military research money available. MIT also has an acoustics and vibration lab. And Amar Bose, who may well have designed your loud speakers, taught acoustics at MIT until his retirement in 2000. I took his intro acoustics course many years ago. I think that he may still teach a course. He is still listed in the MIT directory.

MIT has an ocean acoustics program. That at least used to deal to a large extent with submarine detection, with lots of military research money available. MIT also has an acoustics and vibration lab. And Amar Bose, who may well have designed your loud speakers, taught acoustics at MIT until his retirement in 2000. I took his intro acoustics course many years ago. I think that he may still teach a course. He is still listed in the MIT directory.

HP invented the fucking laser jet printer.

Really? So Gary Starkweather employed a dwarf with very fast drawing skills and very neat handwriting to cram into that very first laser photolithography box, then? You learn something new every day. No wonder the darned things were so expensive at first.

LaserJet is a trademark. Laser printers were invented by Xerox as a natural progression of their Xerographic photolithography process. In fact, Xerox and IBM beat HP to market. There's an MIT page here that confirms this, and you can check out the Wikipedia page here for a more in-depth discussion.

Oh, wait, I see nothing about Xerox's machine fornicating. Perhaps you are right...

If schools were run more like businesses, we would get our kids educated better for less money.

Got any evidence better than anecdote to back that? Centuries of practice attemptimt to support demonstrating conclusions like that have shown how to do it. The most basic of way is called a "case series" -- which is little more than a series of anecdotes, but it's a series of anecdotes observed and reported by a professional with his reputation on the line.

we would expect teachers to get results or be fired

We do that now.

it's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to fire a bad teacher with tenure

This is false. This is beyond false. This is a vicious lie, repeated by witting or unwitting dupes of men with business plans to make money setting up for-their-personal-profit schools.

BTW, you are not 100% accurate.

Ahh, the kind of idiot statement common on right-wing screedshows: a true and utterly meaningless statement uttered as if to support a conclusion, an argument form which, uttered by a thinking person, would constitute a flat lie. If this assessment seems harsh to you, consider this: that argument form was identified as about as meaningful as the barking of a lonely dog more than two thousand years ago, by one of those other foundations of Western civilization.

What we really need is a Red Hat High or OLPC High. The school could be a remodel of an intercity school and could maximize the use of donated computers and systems. It should support the OLPC initiative by providing each student with an OLPC. Text books should be mostly replaced using electronic, open electronic text books.

This would demonstrate several items that contrast with the Microsoft school:

1) A very useful and functional school can be wired with very good, but donated/reclaimed gear at low cost.
2) Techniques such as Linux Terminal Server Project provide more value than Microsoft:
      -- k12 LTSP
3) Open source can accomplish what Microsoft can't -- a technology-oriented school at a reasonable price
      (no shiny new electronic whiteboards or brand-new Dell computers, just use modern white boards).
4) OLPC is very useful in the US (yes, it's not just for the 3rd world):
      -- OLPC
5) Many digital texts and E-books are viable and ready for school use:
      -- Wikiversity
      -- Wikibooks
6) The cost to rewire such a school is more than made up through the use of e-books and through the
      use of donated/reclaimed equipment.
7) The students can make contributions back to the education process (text books, software,
      school architecture, etc.).
8) Open source can interoperate with those that have MS Word/Excel at home and can provide full,
      unrestricted access for those that can't afford to pay for MS software.
      -- OpenOffice
9) The ongoing costs to maintain such a school would be far lower than for Microsoft's proposed school
      (text books, software licenses, hardware support, etc.).

Key points are: Availability, OLPC, free/inexpensive digital text books, student contributions,
lower up-front costs, and lower maintenance costs.

Of course, the down side is that much of the windows-only learning software won't run on Linux, like Magic School Bus (TM). Also, you can't play a DVD on Linux without illegal software (or is it gray-area software?).

Questions: How well do those applications run under Wine? What software really is required for a school?

Note, here in VA, we still have a school board rule that kids can be suspended for 10 days if they "alter, destroy, or erase computer data, or remove computer data or programs". They technically can't boot a computer (altering the logs), erase a file they created (destroying data), copy a file to a floppy (remove computer data), etc. Basically, the school board is clueless....

I am not familiar with the Rutgers glove in the referenced article, but I think it only senses patient motion, it doesn't move the patient's hand around. Our robots guide patients to move their limbs (shoulder/elbow, wrist, hand, ankle...) while they play various simple video games, letting them move if they can, and assisting their movements if they can't, as a therapist would.

You really ought to look into the concept of OpenCourseWare, it's a brilliant concept. MIT's open courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu/ Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL): http://cosl.usu.edu/ These initiatives are providing open-source free course materials including some video lectures available to everyone. I'm confident if you looked into the subject some more you'd see a lot more benefits than the problems you present. I'm not affiilated with MIT OCW in any way (I'm in Europe), but allow me to cut/paste a few lines from their website: >> Results have shown that: 95% of users report MIT OCW has or will help them to be more productive and effective 46% of educators have adopted MIT OCW content to improve their own teaching 38% of students use MIT OCW materials to complement a course they are taking; 34% use MIT OCW to learn about subjects outside of formal classes 56% of self-learners use MIT OCW to enhance personal knowledge; 16% use MIT OCW to stay current in their chosen field 96% of all users would recommend MIT OCW to others And we have also found that MIT OCW is having a significant impact on teaching and learning at MIT: 35% of Fall 2005 entering freshmen aware of MIT OCW prior to attending MIT indicate the site was a significant or very significant influence on their choice of school 71% of all MIT students (undergraduate and graduate) make use of MIT OCW in their research and studies 96% of MIT students using the MIT OCW site report it has had a positive or extremely positive impact on their student experience 40% of MIT faculty using MIT OCW report that the site is a helpful tool in revising/updating courses; 38% use the site for advising students http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/impact.h tm -- Finally allow me to adress the 'problems' you present in your post. >I'm working at a major university in the US, and have been charged with posting pod-casts of class lectures on the internet. Sounds like a great idea, but have you asked the question: Why? The problems you present and the possible solutions you provide for them leaves me with the big question of why you'd even bother with making the podcasts in the first place. It seems you want to make the podcasts available only because you have to and force people to attend the lectures and make it hard to access the podcasts. In my mind the why has this answer: To provide students with an additional ressource, a hardcopy of their lecture they can view if they: 1) Missed a lecture (sick, overslept or in some other way indisposed). Alternative is that they don't get to hear/see the lecture at all! 2) Review what the teacher went over in a lecture > The problem is whether or not posting the videos would allow students to skip class and just download the lecture, instead. Yes and that's a good thing! It makes it possible for people who are unable to attend the lectures to capture the essence of the lecture without actually beeing there. That could be because they're sick, stuck in traffic, attending another lecture or otherwise indisposed. Personally I doubt a lot of people will stay away from the lectures and solely listen to the podcasts, unless you don't gain anything additional from the lectures - and in that case: what's the problem? >I guess the problem is trying to strike the right balance between allowing good students to take advantage of this resource, but discourage bad students from staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam. I feel this is more of a study tactics problem that you need to teach your students through your introduction to the university / study tactics. > So what methods can be used to provide these pod-casts for the students who actually attended class? In terms of when the lecture should be posted, what would be a good time-frame? Immediately after the class? 24 hours? One week? One class behind schedule? What are you trying to accomplish here? By making the podcasts avai

I just want to comment that indeed Dr. Sadoway's lectures from past years are still available online. Yet he still teaches, and students show up to these lectures, and we know what topics (>95%) are unchanged from last year. I think there is something to be said for the tradition of showing up for lectures.

However, the recitation instructors are merely TAs, undergrads or grad students that report to the professor. They are not "experts" in any sense, other than having passed the course with a good grade and having trained to be TAs.

MIT in fact has a system called OpenCourseWare where they post video lectures, course notes, assignments (with solutions), and exams (with solutions) for as many tests as they can. I used the website to test out of both introductory physics (at MIT!), even though my previous experience was just high school physics with no mention of calculus. I gained by learning the information ahead of time and being able to take other classes. MIT gained by teaching one of its students even more material, for no extra cost to them (Dr. Lewin anyway made lectures and tests in 1999, and they're electronically copiable for essentially free). However, for some classes, I wouldn't feel confident trying to cram an OpenCourseWare lecture and I would rather take the class itself - even if OCW were available.

I just want to comment that indeed Dr. Sadoway's lectures from past years are still available online. Yet he still teaches, and students show up to these lectures, and we know what topics (>95%) are unchanged from last year. I think there is something to be said for the tradition of showing up for lectures.

However, the recitation instructors are merely TAs, undergrads or grad students that report to the professor. They are not "experts" in any sense, other than having passed the course with a good grade and having trained to be TAs.

MIT in fact has a system called OpenCourseWare where they post video lectures, course notes, assignments (with solutions), and exams (with solutions) for as many tests as they can. I used the website to test out of both introductory physics (at MIT!), even though my previous experience was just high school physics with no mention of calculus. I gained by learning the information ahead of time and being able to take other classes. MIT gained by teaching one of its students even more material, for no extra cost to them (Dr. Lewin anyway made lectures and tests in 1999, and they're electronically copiable for essentially free). However, for some classes, I wouldn't feel confident trying to cram an OpenCourseWare lecture and I would rather take the class itself - even if OCW were available.

Oh, this is nothing new. I co-authored a paper about this subject back in December of 2005 discussing many of these same issues, it's just that they have now been brought to the forefront.

http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/6.805/student-papers/f all05-papers/student-papers.html

-jsoltren

But we still have 99% of the population acting like it's a known fact that smoking kills, despite no hard evidence to back it up.

In fact, using a Bayesian analysis in which an intermediate variable (namely tar accumulation) is introduced between smoking and cancer, you can demonstrate the causal relationship between smoking and cancer. I don't remember the exact details, but this presentation seems to provide a decent summary.

Will this work with the One Laptop Per Child program (OLPC)? I thought I had heard that the OLPC planned to use wiki technology for books as one of its goals. A major need of that program is free, open, but accurate and factual content, not just technology.

Second, there is no technical way to have an electronic voting system which both preserves the secret ballot and the public vote count.

I suppose technically you are correct. That's not the same as saying that there is no technical way to have an electronic voting system which preserves the secret ballot public verifiability. A great example is David Chaum's paper Secret Ballot Receipts and Transparent Integrity .

Yes, MIT's OpenCourseWare project is a valuable resource. Overall, there is not going to be a substitute for hands on learning in many of their primary subject areas. I think MIT is in a unique position in most of its major subjects like engineering that are going to require a lot of hands on work and it just doesn't make sense to hold back for economic reasons.

In there case it is an instance of something that costs very little extra for them and could greatly benefit many

So go learn yourself some Java young people: 6.092 Java Preparation for 6.170

Overall, simply make classroom participation or at least attendance part of the grade if you want people to show up. Make attendance worth 8-10% of the final grade, and have a no excuses policy that drops 2 percent for every no show except with the deans permission. That way students can make rational decisions about classroom attendence without having to kill themselves if they are under the weather. Just don't hold back the knowledge.

I can't tell you how many classes I skipped in college, far too many, but at least I got a good portion of the knowledge through getting other peoples notes and doing the work.

Yes, MIT's OpenCourseWare project is a valuable resource. Overall, there is not going to be a substitute for hands on learning in many of their primary subject areas. I think MIT is in a unique position in most of its major subjects like engineering that are going to require a lot of hands on work and it just doesn't make sense to hold back for economic reasons.

In there case it is an instance of something that costs very little extra for them and could greatly benefit many

So go learn yourself some Java young people: 6.092 Java Preparation for 6.170

Overall, simply make classroom participation or at least attendance part of the grade if you want people to show up. Make attendance worth 8-10% of the final grade, and have a no excuses policy that drops 2 percent for every no show except with the deans permission. That way students can make rational decisions about classroom attendence without having to kill themselves if they are under the weather. Just don't hold back the knowledge.

I can't tell you how many classes I skipped in college, far too many, but at least I got a good portion of the knowledge through getting other peoples notes and doing the work.

--

Cadillacjoe

--

Cadillacjoe

--

Cadillacjoe

Lecture videos are avaliable for a number of courses at ocw.mit.edu. Another poster commented that OCW content was very poor. This may have been true early on, but it's clearly getting better.

UC Berkeley now has video/audio lecutres avaliable for a number of their courses at webcast.berkeley.edu

Sometimes you can find lectures from MIT and Berkeley at video.google.com. For example, Physics for future Presidents

Questions? At lecture?

I was talking to Dr. Sadoway at MIT about exactly this the other day. If you raise your hand in lecture, he'll throw you out. But recitations (1 hour, 2 or 3 times a week, with a TA, in classroom-sized instead of lecture hall-sized groups) are entirely Q&A sessions. He posts videos of the lecture and doesn't care if you don't show up - there's no interaction anyway, and so many people show up that he doesn't feel the loss of students. He said one student would use the video lectures entirely, because those allow pausing and rewinding the difficult parts.

If you're talking about a class that's taught somewhat interactively, then this may not work. But if you're talking about a large one-way lecture, go ahead and post the lectures immediately. There's no harm to the learning process at all, if you're going to be sitting for an hour and watching the professor talk anyway.

Chakrabarti and Strauss's Term Paper on the subject.

In this paper, we show that since CAPS uses profiles to select passengers for increased scrutiny, it is actually less secure than systems that employ random searches. In particular, we present an algorithm called Carnival Booth that demonstrates how a terrorist cell can defeat the CAPS system.

Space Elevator Primer has all the basic questions answered. The worst that could happen is a few grams of ribbon will be spread over every few square kilometers!

The top half always escapes. The lower half flutters down reaching a top speed of 0.5 m/s. If a long piece happened to drape itself over a very tall building it might put a small load on it. This is a (OMG) PowerPoint on the risks that is very good. http://www.mit.edu/people/gassend/spaceelevator/SE C2005/BrokenElevator.ppt

They tried to simulate it... it depends. If it breaks in the upper part, the cable will (literally) tie the Earth many times, but it shouldn't do much harm (they say). Not even killing people under the cable.
here and very iteresting here.

I only wonder how could such event be interpreted in countries without much civilisation... a cable you cannot break and without and end. Woah.

They tried to simulate it... it depends. If it breaks in the upper part, the cable will (literally) tie the Earth many times, but it shouldn't do much harm (they say). Not even killing people under the cable.
here and very iteresting here.

I only wonder how could such event be interpreted in countries without much civilisation... a cable you cannot break and without and end. Woah.

>Most likely, the cable would break, the 99.999% of the cable above the impact point would start to drift upwards,

Umm, no. Real answer: It depends, and none of the answers are good. See also:

http://www.mit.edu/people/gassend/spaceelevator/br eaks/index.html

Yeah, yeah. So they copied from Xerox PARC and Project Athena. Didn't everyone?

Yet if they don't get it into print, it can't be used in a classroom setting.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry.

While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.'

Don't believe the BSD hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

Just an aside: given such a codebase, no software tool helps you start understanding it better than a stack of printouts, a pencil, and a big conference table.

> A colleague of mine recently had a brief paper
> (restricted to a maximum of two pages) rejected
> because it was too short - at exactly two pages.
> I kid you not.

How could this surprise anyone?

I don't think anyone would ever claim that the current system was any good at letting the good papers in - but it's job is less to identify all the good papers than it is to identify all the bad ones.

it's like the exact opposite of an email spam filter: with email, a few "nigerians" in the inbox do much less harm than a false positive in the junk folder, while one bad paper more in a conference or a journal would certainly be seen as worse than one good paper less.

having said that, i have to realize that my arguments are not always in line with empiricism.

Have you heard of End User Development? It's the middle ground between "dynamically hiding menu items" and a C compiler. Its intent is to put users in control of computer objects without them to learn the physical and logical details of computing.

No. If you're gonna program a computer, learn how to program.
I agree. But system builders have to arrive at a commitment: if you require your users to program, build a programming environment that suits their needs, don't throw them into a general-purpose programming language (which requires a CS degree to be mastered).

making something "user friendly" means making the front-end more simple
No, it means making a back-end that matches the user expectations of what the system should be, and a front-end that put the user in control of that backend. Current OSs are too many times in care of controlling the user actions, when it should be the other way around.

But this complexity always eventually compounds and compounds until the end user can't understand what's happening and gets confused.
Not really. This only happens when the designer is building a system with the wrong complexity, instead of first learning which complex tools the user needs for her work - and then building just those. File managers? windows? those are just eyecandy for computer objects that should only be relevant to engineers - namely inodes and processes. BTW, those are also metaphors - they represent the movement of electric signals over silicon chip.

If the system was built around objects in the user's domain, users would manage as much complexity as they'd require. The desktop metaphor was an early application of this principle, intended for office workers. Unfortunately it has been abused into a general depiction for all computing, and that's why it fails nowadays. We need new metaphors for the new tasks, not just throwing the low-level "OS-from-the-70s" metaphor in front of current users.

You'ld need a very good AI to do that.

"DRM really hampers the flow of information in education."

OK, I swore to stop responding to "Your Rights Online" articles, mostly because they really don't have anything to do with my rights online... but THIS is just stupid... and unsupported.

HOW, exactly, does DRM hamper the flow of information in education? The parent posts not ONE instance where the bald assertion made is true... yet gets moderated up.

Let's consider higher education, first: If a particular college/university's policies permit it, then, a professor is free to release their lectures, as he or she wishes... and in fact, some institutions release their curriculum, in part, or in whole, for free. MIT comes to mind: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

They've chosen to make those resources freely available, without DRM... clearly, DRM hasn't hampered the flow of information in education in this case.

Do you dispute this?

"It's important to remember that the "traditional" classroom is changing. We now have things like "distance learning.""

No offense, but, the wealth of knowledge available now, without DRM, so far outweighs your non-examples, to render your post ludicrous... and, "distance learning" is only a login to the 'net away, for anyone that wishes to learn...

How about Project Gutenberg? http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

You mean to tell me, that free, non-DRM access to some of the best written knowledge, insights, entertainment, created by the best of us, over thousands of years, means nothing?

And, it will only get better, over time.

So, how does DRM hamper that "flow of information", please?

"It's important to think about innovative current or future uses instead of dwelling on ancient historical uses of computers in education."

How about just leveraging the vast store of knowledge that others, more dedicated than you, have made available, for free, without DRM, online, as it currently exists?

"(BTW, let's be grownups and stop with the personal attacks, M-Kay?)"
I've refrained from such, but I admit I was tempted :)

I'm sorry, but, there's *so* much available now, that I at times resent the fact that my time is so limited - I have to work for a living - that cuts into the time I can spend reading, and learning.

Regards,

dj

Several other people here have mentioned Logo - an excellent choice, in my view. I recommend taking a look at the three volumes of Brian Harvey's Computer Science Logo Style .

The Logo tree has spawned several other languages - two worth looking at are NetLogo and StarLogo TNG - both of these languages are particularly well-suited to modeling projects, the first with a traditional text-oriented perspective, the second with a graphical programming interface.

Another programming language specially designed for education is Alice - the language is designed so students can graduate rather quickly to more complex object-oriented languages. Python, Ruby, and Java would all be good follow-up languages to Alice.

Finally, let me gently suggest that you not follow through with at least one portion of your original plan: the game c-jump is a very poor choice for introducing students to programming. Not only is the game completely inappropriate for any child over the age of 3-4 (it is just a very boring version of snakes and ladders), it is also extremely poor from a pedagogical viewpoint, with no creative activity on the part of the students, reinforcing notions of code as arbitrary sets of commands. The first couple of tutorials in Alice will be far more enjoyable for your students, and actually get them involved in some real thinking about programming.