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Girls not Going into CS
An anonymous reader writes "The Times has an article about what you already know: few girls go on to be IT women. For example, the 2001 AP exam in computer science drew 19,000 boys and just 2,400 girls. Information technology, despite its relative youth, has been far slower to approach gender equality than law or medicine, fields which decades ago overtly excluded women. The problem is not lack of smarts: Girls statistically outperform boys overall in grade school and make up 57% of college graduates, margins that are growing to the point that some colleges are toying with affirmative action for men."
That's nowhere near as funny as most of the "in soviet Russia" jokes...
How many website designers, help desk support techs, and programers do you see doing calculus when performing their jobs?
Perhaps programmers at NASA or McDonald-Douglus do this but not %95 of the programming jobs out there. I included help desk support professionals because if you look in the want ads today you see that EE or cs is required for them??? With this poor economy today this might be your only job after graduation after studying all that advanced mathmatics.
My father was a software engineer for almost 20 years and has never did anything beyond basic algrebra and good logic when writing his programs. He did quite a few bubble sort and btree routines using assembler and was quite good. I agree with you on logic as essential. If you can't think logically well then you do not belong in computer programming. Sure writing a compiler or a scientific program that has to be determined not just how but when a program would finish would require this advanced math. This is mainly done in simulation programming which only universities or research institutions actually do. This is a niche and not required as a whole.
CS students know mathmatics well but do not know how to program well because they spend there time writing tiny mathmatics oriented programs rather then learning how to program large projects effectively. Infact thanks to Microsoft bribing oops I mean contributing to universities many cs students do not eveb know how to login to a unix box but hey, they know these exotic Djiktras aligorthms. right?
What is needed is computer programming as a major. Bussiness skills and accounting mathmatics should be applied since that is what programmers will write after they graduate. I think it would be great to have teams of 3-5 students write huge bussiness oriented programs that are over a million lines of code so they can learn how to code effictively. Methods of code and language use should be discussed, taugh, and graded. If you write code that looks ugly or can exhibit bugs then that student should recieve a lower grade regardless if the program worked. If another group applies supurb software engineering practices in a complex language like c++ then they should get an A+. A few hacking courses like assembly should be included as well. A graduate with a good GPA will perform well at any programming job. Someone whith a poor GPA because he/she does not have good spacial skills should not be considered a poor programmer. This is what I am in favor for.
I also think CS should remain a major for those interested in algorthm research as well as those who want to write compilers and operating systems. I just think the industry is so huge now that programming should be added as well.
What also pisses me off is that cs majors have to take alot of liberal arts courses but liberal arts majors never have to take any math or science courses beyond the into to "x". I would like to physics for poets.
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