A High School Programming Curriculum For All Students?

jonboydev writes "I know there have been many postings on what kids should begin programming with, but I have a little different perspective: I am a software developer looking to help my brother, who is a high school teacher, develop a programming curriculum. The catch is that it is a class for all students to take, not just those interested in programming, and therefore will focus heavily on teaching problem solving. This class would follow after a class using Lego MindStorms, and we are planning on using Python. I'm sure many of you would agree that everyone can benefit from learning to program and any help would be greatly appreciated!"

Comments

How about Alice?

[KingSkippus]

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this, so this isn't an endorsement, but...

Have you considered taking a look at Alice? It's the free system worked on by the late Randy Pausch to teach programming without jumping straight into coding. From the site:

Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games...By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

Re:How about Alice?

[BigMike1020]

My father teaches a college course using Alice. It's sort of a programming for non-computer-science majors class. I've sat down with him a couple of times and played with the program. I suspect that for someone who doesn't have any programming experience Alice is really fun (creating movies, making things move onscreen), but for someone with any experience its all just a hassle. Too many mouse clicks and drags are needed to get simple things done, and sometimes the natural-language style of the program isn't as natural-language as you want it to be.
But if it's a free program it can't hurt to try it out yourself.

Please don't.

[Jurily]

The catch is that it is a class for all students to take, not just those interested in programming

What the fuck is wrong with the educational system again? Teach those who are interested. Or those who have any chance of not being a retard at it.

Teacher 1: "Hey, I heard that computer-thingie makes people smart."
Teacher 2: "Okay, let's force it on every little prick we have here! That'll teach 'em to touch one ever again!"

Christ. What's next? Quantum physics in ancient Sumer dumbed down so everyone can pass?

not quite problem solving

[v1]

Programming more importantly is problem analysis, figuring out how to use the tools and information you have to build towards a solution.

In most of my programming projects, there are myriad different ways to approach the problem, and the time taken to compare them I find to be the most important part of any programming project.

Recent example: I just got done coding a utilization graph for a server. In bash. Obviously bash is not the ideal language but was required so a lot of thought had to go into how to approach the problem.

After some consideration, I determined the way the utilization information was gathered and stored was the most important thing, because bash isn't particularly speedy and having to mow through 100,000 long log file isn't going to be pretty. So the main focus of the problem turned from one of "how do I display a graph in bash?" to "how do I record the information in a way that bash can quickly process it?" This requires understanding the limits of the tools you are provided with, more than understanding the actual problem. Only after you have this can you move toward a good solution to the problem. No matter how clever of an idea you have, or how "perfect" of a solution you come up with, picking the correct path to that solution is often just as important as the results.

Most of the time when I am going to code something, I spend a good hunk of time just sitting and thinking about it, considering how things are going to progress if I try different approaches. Only after I'm satisfied I have a good "plan of attack", do I actually start working on a solution. My solutions aren't always optimal, but they're usually pretty close, and save me a LOT of valuable time which would otherwise be wasted in having to either make fundamental changes to the foundation late in the game, (every programmer's nightmare) or dealing with extremely topheavy already-written code that isn't producing results in the way that I need them and has to either be data-converted or be clumsily coped with as-is. (every maintainer's nightmare)

I suppose you could sum it up by saying, "teach them problem analysis before you teach them problem solving.

I helped my dad do this

[Fished]

My dad is a High School Physics/AP Math teacher who taught programming this year. I encouraged him NOT to use C++ (his original plan) and to use Python instead, and to use Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science as the text. He has been absolutely delighted both with Python and with the choice of text. Now, it has to be said that this doesn't really address your case, since all of his students are pretty much AP materials (and it's a private school, etc.) However, I would encourage you to take a really close look at that text.

Re:Good luck with that

[jgtg32a]

It didn't work like that for me. In high school I was very happy to take a programming class using C, technically C++ but we never got to objects, but when I got there it quickly started to suck.

Our teacher was a bastard, all of our assignments were text processing, using functions that we had to write our selves. I could do it but it sucked and wasn't fun so I basically swore off programming for the next two years of high-school.

In college we had to take a programming class which I wasn't overly happy about. The language we used was Perl, and there was a good amount of text processing in that class also but it didn't suck for two reasons.

1. We used a language that was appropriate for the type of assignments.
2. The class was well ordered, we had an end goal, we were given a project at the beginning of class and every assignment was designed to help us complete the project.

I second the parent!

[Samschnooks]

It's a damned shame that you were modded troll. The troll moderation is NOT for modding down something you disagree with people.

That said, your actual post is a little harsh dude.

This BS of making kids take shit so that they'll be "well rounded" is horse shit.

ALL of the greats in the World; Past Present and Future, were NOT well rounded! They specialized in ONE thing and did it extremely well. Trying to be "well rounded" is a path to mediocrity - which explains much of our state today.

I wish I could find the article, but it stated that it was in the 1970s that some Ivy League admission director pulled out of her ass that incoming students should be "well rounded". Of course, when an Ivy League school does something, all the others follow like stupid sheep.

This is stupid

[Reality Master 101]

Not everyone is interested in programming, or any sort of engineering. Get over it. Forcing every kid to take programming (and "forcing" is the right word) is like forcing every kid to learn how to build an engine for their car (and NOT something useful, like changing the oil).

With all the cutbacks in arts and general sciences that take a broad approach to education, why are you wasting their precious school time and especially-precious-now school money on such a specific skill?

It's like someone who is passionate about embroidery insisting that every kid should learn embroidery for their own good ("Think about the problem solving skills they'll learn by figuring out what stitches they need to get to the pattern they want!") Whatever general skills they learn in this class, they can learn better by studying a more general subject.