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Ubiquitous Computing Gadget To Teach Coding
An anonymous reader writes "A distance learning university in the UK has revamped its IT curriculum to attract more students — the biggest change is that budding coders will get a chunk of hardware which plugs into a computer via USB and can be programmed using a language called Sense — based on MIT's Scratch 'drag and drop' programming language. The university hopes this gadget-based approach will encourage fewer students to give up on their studies."
i dunno if a simplistic approach is really the best way to keep uni students in the game. As soon as things get tougher they're going to head for the hills
I've played with Scratch and it seems useful for introducing some programming concepts, but try to do anything meaningful (i.e. large) with it and the drawbacks of this approach to programming become apparent. However, if they ever release version 2.0 which apparently may support "user defined blocks", a.k.a. functions, that would be a great help.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Why not make it something self sufficient, something primitive and programmable!
What purpose does the hardware serve? Why do we need to plug something into a USB port to write programs?
Palm trees and 8
The university hopes this gadget-based approach will encourage fewer students to give up on their studies.
Being able to get a job after graduation is too hard. Lets give out gadgets instead!
What I don't understand is why an IT curriculum has this "theory of programming" and "computer science-y" stuff. I understand its in the UK, but over here in the US, CS = theory and programming, and IT = working for da man in the IT department doing database design and rebooting windows machines, at most hitting a little legacy cobol. If the little gadget had a postgresql or mysql install on it, or maybe 4 or 5 virtual routers with little virtual LANs connecting them, or a MCSE cheatsheet lab, then it would be a useful in a IT curriculum. It sounds like the ideal gadget for a computer engineering curriculm, or even straight up EE if it had a DSP unit inside it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Dunno how to feel about this really.
Personally I think if you don't have the kind of interest in computers that drives you to "figure it out" and get past the "can't do a damn thing" stage, you are probably gonna make a crumby programmer. My intro to programming was on a TRS-80 (actually a dragon32.. which is essentially a TRS-80 clone) and I spent many months messing around with it. Most of the programmers I know who have found success generally have the same story.
But then times change. Maybe this is what we need now. A different set of skills and general mindset. Maybe the things that attracted me to programming are no longer as relevant.
Probably can't hurt at least.
Programming is too hard with all that darn syntax and obscure words and stuff. We have to make this for the common man. So now, programming will all be done via Scratch and Sense.
Sure, need a loop? Drag over a loop. Need and if/then/else? it's on that toolbar over there. Need to consume a web service? Look in the Mashable toolbar.
Oh, need to parse a string of text to see if the input matches your criteria? No, that's called regex, you'll need to find a real programmer to help you with that.
Need to test your security/performance/useability? Sorry, go see that real programmer again.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Why try to attract/retain kids in any major? Some jobs are just not for some people. Something tells me a different coding language/piece of hardware isn't going to retain kids that decide they don't like IT.
However, if they ever release version 2.0 which apparently may support "user defined blocks", a.k.a. functions, that would be a great help.
Oh that is _so_ not what we need!
Contained as a "learning language" where you can go so far and then basically have to go use a real language... it's great.
Start adding stuff to make it useful on real projects though, and you'll see it used in real projects. "Easy to learn, visual" and "good for long term maintainability" tend not to belong together.
IT needs apprenticeships not work free Internship where at some jobs you end working hard for free or doing stuff like being a Coffee boy or copy boy.
apprenticeships + class room is better then the theory loaded + filler class that most 2-4 years curriculum has. May it a 2 year mixed apprenticeships + class room setup with on going class after that as well.
Hands on is needed and books and cert tests are at times far off from the real work place. The tech schools are more hands on them the big school curriculum and don't have classes like art history. Also some the curriculum are a little to much math loaded.
Also there are people out there who are not cut out for a 4 year curriculum big school plan but can do real good in a apprenticeship plan.
I think this idea is brilliant, albet a little late in the game for a higher level education.
I recommend people check out what _why wrote about this very thing, because I feel the perspective he brings puts this kind of idea in a different light.
http://viewsourcecode.org/why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredicament.html
The problem is not enough programming students so the trick up their sleeve is a ubiquitous (what exactly is meant by that?), visually programmed computing device? Makes sense if they were dropping out because they didn't have a chunk of hardware they can use in the school lab then take home, but I doubt that's it.
And I don't know about the visual programming language, I imagine they'll start programming in a text language eventually so you'd just delay them quitting if that's the cause.
This device just seems like a visually programmed arduino.
Start adding stuff to make it useful on real projects though, and you'll see it used in real projects. "Easy to learn, visual" and "good for long term maintainability" tend not to belong together.
1990s called, they want their Visual Basic back ;-)
VB plus Access was a world class application demo tool. Fast n easy. The problem was 'ship it' was what usually came out of the demo targets mouths...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
This year IT students make up 10 per cent of the university's student intake with some 263,000 studying the subject.
Huh? The OU has 2.6 million students? 4% of the UK's population?
the university has some 25,000 students who have "paused" their IT studies.
The OU is a huge institution, but the 263,000 is the total number of students of all disciplines. This means that there are around 25,000 total IT students, and roughly the same number of "paused" ones.
Somebody mean spirited might conclude that while distance learning might work for Psychology and even Philosophy, it's not suitable for highly technical disciplines such as CS...
-- jch
1983 called, they want their Turbo Pascal back. ;-)
Learnt that lesson the hard way... big time! Except substitute access with excel.
Now any time I'm asked to do a demo or prototype version of something.. I make it very clear that it's not production ready.
"This demo can handle one entry. The real version will handle as many as you want".
And show only the part that is novel (that is, the reason for the demo) and all the other stuff "will be implemented in the real version". Even if it is trivial to implement... don't do it!
The University I went to offers a class in embedded device programming, and we had to buy our own chip & board which connects via USB, and comes with a CD with an IDE with witch you can program the device in C or Assembler. That was a couple of years ago. I really enjoyed the class. While drag and drop programming sounds cool and all, I don't know if I would have come out of the class with as deep an understanding if we had gone that route. They could always offer both classes I guess.
YES! YES!
Someone mod this up before I have a stroke!
This is _exactly_ what happens!
This amounts to watering down a course so people on the far left of the bell curve can still pass. In a world that increasingly needs strong expertise, a process like this will never produce anyone who can compete. My advice is to stick with credible universities that have strong reputations.
I didn't give up on college because I didn't want to code. I gave up because for some reason the teachers thought knowing that the old woman that was in the navy invented COBOL was somehow important. Tests had nothing to do with ability to code. .. Here is 100 lines of code, whats wrong with it. Oh there is a semi colon missing somewhere. Yea that's a really good test.
This is not learning programming, this is the dumbing down of IT staff. Programming is learn how something works, why it works. Using the building block of knowledge to produce code that does something. Using the knowledge to fix issues, to make modifications, to add functionality, to make it more efficient. I have had to learn over 20 programming languages over the 35 years of programming in my career. I have programmed functions that had never been done before. This is not programming, it is cookie cutter plug and play, there is no creativity, no thinking out of the box, no risk taking, no pushing the boundaries. These "programmers" will never understand what it is they do and why it works. Do you think any group of these "programmers" could create Doom? Word? Excel? Wordpro? word perfect? I am afraid the response is...."not a chance"
after it was recommended to me on /. The results were great. The kids really enjoyed it and the presentation where I introduced it was well attended and generated a lot of enthusiasm. Many of the kids went on to download scratch and use it at home.
I hope I can get some of these boards to do a follow-on presentation. they seem to be much better than the other scratch boards that I have seen.
Nullius in verba
They already have a gadget that teaches coding--the computer they're plugging it into. They should just download Python or something. They say Python is good for beginners. When they're ready to do real work it's good for that too; but really the language isn't that important. They should learn algorithms and data structures, and if that's too hard then it would be better not to turn them loose at hiring managers anyway. It'll just lead to bad feelings all around.
Back in the early 1980s, I studied an Open University course called TM222 - The Digital Computer. This course covered similar ground, though it involved programming in Basic and in 8085 assembler to control a peripheral board using a loan microcomputer called Hektor 2 which had 4Kb RAM/8Kb ROM ( http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=602&st=1 ). I've still got the handbook somewhere... I also studied another OU computing course around the same time that had more of a general programming bias. This involved coding in UCSD Pascal on an OU VAX computer in Milton Keynes. To access this, the student would book sessions at a local college that provided access and use a Dec printing terminal mated to a 300 baud modem with an acoustic coupler that the telephone handset rested in. The whole affair was kept in a large plywood box to prevent the uninitiated from fiddling with it. I do remember that the login procedure was a bit convoluted because the same equipment was used by students on another OU course.
But it was all great fun!
My main memory of OU courses in general is that the teaching materials and support were excellent. I only gave up because I was able to go to a "proper" (ie conventional) local university and complete a computing degree cheaper and more quickly that with the OU. I don't know how well they perform nopwadays.
If you want to make ubiquitous computing evaluating sensor data in a way which is trivial enough for beginners in programming easy then use a dataflow language, like labview; I dont like the latter but i things like "LED on if temperature higher than" are really easy to program and modify.
Dataflow language may be not my personal favorite, but they do their job.
The OU -- the institution that charges non-UK residents approximately twice the tuition and then sends region 2 encoded DVDs to US residents.
Apart from the cluelessness of sending a region-2 encoded disk to the USA, there is the added question of why the disks are region-encoded at all.
I can accept the issue of double the cost for non-UK residents (it's market pricing, rather than cost-based), but they really should encourage those non-UK residents to take more courses, not put them off with incompatible DVDs.
OK, it wasn't a major barrier for me -- since we have DVD player that plays just about any disk, but not everyone has such a player, or in the case of a PC, potentially lock their DVD drive to a certain region by changing the region state too many times.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
... and only fools will use it. What we really need are more programmers that can't handle programming languages. Hell, most of the people I've dealt with over the years clearly majored in beer.
I introduced ~75 elementary school kids to scratch. ... The kids really enjoyed it...
Key word being kids. Kids don't attend the university. (Well, in theory, anyway...)
The point being, scratch may be great for kids who don't know how to type or are just learning the core principles of logic (if, while, and, or, etc.). I would think a university should be targeting a more mature student.
Plus, if someone has started an IT degree without ever having written a program or taught themselves a programming language, I believe they're there for the wrong reasons and it's just as well they wash out. Those are the ones that aspire to be merely adequate.
They might try management instead. The pay is better and sub-par performance seems to be tolerated...
<flame>your comments here
They hope the new approach "will encourage fewer students to give up on their studies". So it will still encourage students to give up, only fewer than the old method?
I'd say 16th out of 80 universities that submitted their CS to the last RAE makes the OU reasonably credible in the field of computing expertise.
What metrics do you use for measuring universities?
If they cant do it way are they there in the first place? the university is only trying to increase its revenue
When they first announced this course along with computing degree revamp around a year ago there was a lot of discussion amongst people that who had been planning on doing the course it replaces. A lot of people understandably didn't like how simplistic they were making it seem at the time.
The course is required to complete any of the named computing degrees offered by the Open University, however the featured device and other course material seems to be aimed at a 'this is a computer and it has flashing lights and beeps and there is this interweb thing you should know about' stuff I did when I was 14 and is not even close to what I would expect for a first year university computing course. Give me a real programming language C, Pascal, even VB would do at a pinch , teach me about data types, data structures, procedures, objects, etc. instead of drag and drop programming for a simple computer with a few sensors and lights attached, something that would be more suitable in a primary school.
The time to study the course (5-10 hours a week for the best part of a year), including assessments etc, along with the cost (£770) of the pointless required course and the completely uninteresting subject matter has put me in two minds if I should even bother studying a computing degree with them as it will begin with me wasting a year of my life. Especially as I was only planning on doing so to learn something new and interesting...
[The Universe] has gone offline.
They didn't go far enough. They could ensure even better success rates by dropping the requirements for courses, and issue B.Sc to anyone that manages to find the registration, M.Sc for all dummies that managed to spell their names correctly the first time, Ph.D for all that manage to fill out the registration form correctly on first try.
Be serious, any IT/CS degrees offered need to consist of:
1.) practical programming experience (hard to teach, so it should be more in the sense of encouraging students to do it for the fun of it. No programming course will be able to bring the student past basic literacy in environment X, but the fluency needed for professional work is practically never learned in a classroom.) And please stop telling students that enlist for CS that they don't need any pre-knowledge, e.g. yeah, our classes will even teach you how to power on a PC.
2.) Theoretical CS knowledge. While many people take this as very unsexy, the math and CS theory are the base of all that stuff we do. How can you develop/design anything if you have no basic concept of algorithms and datastructures? (O-notion, classification of algorithms, ...) Same applies to math (I'd hope that every CS at the BS level can explain what the problems are with floats, and why it's critical to sort an array of floats before adding them.) => you need it basic knowledge, or all the fun parts of our profession (designing systems, be it databases, pattern matching, clever data mining) are not really possible.
3.) Some generic classes for a certain level of professional behavior, I mean, it's really fantastic if somebody is able to write an email that is mostly grammar-correct. Depending upon your environment secondary schools might provide that generic knowledge or not. Here around, it's difficult because there is no standardized exit exam at the secondary level, so for example CS maths include more or less the complete secondary school content in 1-2 semesters. (Which leads to a situation where students that know the stuff, but still want to sit in to see if they miss some basics are nicely asked to use headphones while playing games/surfing/...)
Thumbing down education standards won't help anybody that needs to work the profession, AFAIK, drag and drop programming has not yet arrived in the work place. And it's only of limited fun if you need to teach the new VBA "developer" the concept of loops. (Not the syntax of loops in VB. The CONCEPT).