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Ask Slashdot: What Were You Taught About Computers In High School?
An anonymous reader writes "What was taught to you about computers in High School? Computer use and computer science in schools are regular headlines, but what 'normal' do we compare it to? It's not a shared reference. A special class with Commodore PETs was set up just after I graduated, and I'm only starting to grey. Everybody younger has had progressive levels of exposure. What was 'normal' for our 40-, 30-, and 20-year olds here? And how well did it work for you, and your classmates?" For that matter, what's it like now — if you're in middle or high school now, or know students who are, what's the tech curriculum like?
Summer school, sure...
In the 80s, went to some summer camp after 2nd grade that had some science and tech classes... apart from getting into trouble by sticking a knife into an electrical outlet and playing lots of Spy Hunter (I was like, a god for a day because I made it to the boats level), that was probably my first into to Logo. But we didn't do anything amazing with it.
Somewhere around 6th grade at an International Catholic school in Thailand they gave us a touch typing class. That was genuinely useful, and accounts tracked our progress over the sessions, which was pretty remarkable given that they were green-screen DOS boxes or something crappy and barely networked. Later on in HS in the US, maybe 9th or 10th grade, they threw us in a short one-time "computer lab" with some typing tutor software, but that was crap.
Around 11th grade (1994), we had some CAD work on Macs in tech ed., but that was only because we were in a special Science & Tech magnet program... don't think that would have been the norm at most high schools.
Also, I used to spend my lunch breaks in the library, playing with the nice 3D graphing calculator on MacOS9. But I was, like, the only one, even in a magnet school.
That was pretty much it. Everything else I learned from my own tinkering at home with a Turbo Pascal book, playing with POVRay, and reading my TI-85 calculator user's manual straight through and programming a crappy Galaga clone. I never felt like I had what it takes to become a fully-fledged CS programmer like my friends who were self-taught into doing awesome demoscene assembly, so I ran off and majored in mechanical and aerospace engineering instead. Engineers seem to get bigger computers to play with anyway :P
Honestly the best school/computer experience I had was in Elementary school in the early 80s. It was actually quite early in computer education history for a school to have a computer in every room and computer labs, but our little country school in northern Indiana had them (Apple IIs and Atari 400/800s) and we had a couple sessions each week were we would try different programs and just experience them. They even had us writing short programs as early as 2nd grade. All the computer classes I took after that in high school and at the college level were woefully out of date and had teachers/professors who either didn't know what they were talking about or who were teaching 20 year old technologies. So if you want to compare computer education now to something before, the bar isn't very high as far as I'm concerned.
I graduated in 1973. What did I learn about computers there? Nothing at all.
You damn kids get off my lawn...
...were taught BASIC and 6502 Assembly.
Machines used: the year before I got into compsci at the highschool - a PDP11
First semester doing compsci: TRS80 model IV machines.
Second semester: we got a bunch of Apple IIe machines, which is how we got the assembly programming done.
Prerequisites were pre-algebra or algebra1 taken concurrently.
--
BMO
I'm currently a junior at high school, and really, the tech curriculum can't even be called that in my opinion. The best, and most in-depth, course at my school is Computer Science A AP (There used to be a B, but that was cancelled). I'm in it right now, and I basically sleep through all the classes. While it's true that for anyone who hasn't at any prior programming experience it's a bit more of a challenge, I only had a bare-bones introduction to C (not even a lot of pointer stuff, I had stop going to classes early), and even the object oriented stuff is not that hard. Granted, it's still early in the year. But in comparison, the rest of the tech curriculum is just Word Processing 101 and Microsoft Office. There's very little in the way of how computers work or how to program (Comp Sci AP is the only programming class). And it's a little depressing when you hear someone in your class say, "Wow, X person built a computer by himself," and you respond, "That's not too hard if he just bought the parts and put it together," and their next line is "But it's really hard. He must have programmed it himself and stuff." I think half the problem today is insufficient technology education in schools, which is why the "Tech Guy" stereotype even exists. And don't even get me started on the terrible security of my school district...
We had IBM model PS/2 model 25's and 30's. They are basically the same machine, but the model 30 was a beige box while the model 25 had an integral monitor. Both had the fantastic model M keyboard.
Above all else, I learned that you need to hire the ferry to cross the river. Fording the river is a fool's game.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I graduated from a pretty typical suburban NJ high school in 1977. We had an HP 9810 (http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=51), and also a ARS-33 connected to a time-shared BASIC system a few towns away. I got to play with them my junior and senior years. That was my first introduction to any sort of computer. It was, or course, also my first introduction to computer games (hunt the wumpus, lunar landrer, and some kind of Star Trek thing where you got to explore the galaxy and blow up klingons with photon torpedos.
I was also lucky to spend the summer between my last two years of high school at a program run by Stevens Tech, where I was exposed to FORTRAN and PDP-10 assembler (both via punch cards).
I don't think we were taught anything about computers in class, but there was a computer programming club. We used PORTRAN, which is a cut-down version of FORTRAN - I think it stands for Port-a-punch FORTRAN. The cards were sent away to a computer a few hundred km away, and a syntax error listing came back by the following week. It wasn't exactly a productive environment, so we competed to see who could get the most different errors in a single program.
Computers were unheard-of in school in the mid-70's, at least in the small town where I grew up, but I did take Typing Class where I learned what I believe is the single most valuable skill that school taught me: how to type properly.
When I took Typing Class I was the only boy in a class of about 20-odd girls. I wanted to learn how to type because I thought it would be a useful skill but, frankly, the idea of typing on a computer never actually crossed my mind. I learned to type on a big Underwood manual typewriter. Toward the end of the class that I was in, the school got one electric typewriter, which was apparently a new technology at the time. It was a special reward to be allowed to use the electric typewriter in Typing Class.
In addition to how to type, a skill that I've used every day of my life, Typing Class also taught me a number of other useful things, like how to correctly fold a letter to fit it into an envelope (which a surprising number of people don't know how to do), and how to do basic filing and the like, all of which have come in handy since I have my own small business and need to be able to do things like that.
As for computers, I learned that on my own. I knew some guys that had Apple computers, and I purchased a Commodore 64 of my own in 1982 since it was much cheaper than an Apple II. My thought at that time was that I would buy a C64 and see if I liked having a computer and if so, I would buy a "good one", i.e. an Apple II, afterward. Once I discovered the capabilities of the Commodore 64, I never did buy that Apple. My next purchase after that was a Commodore 128, followed by an Amiga, followed by a series of MS-DOS machines, and today I have several desktops and laptops, all of which run on Linux.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
.....Selectric typewriters. (Class of 1978 represent!)
I'd tell you to get off my lawn, but it went underwater when Pangea split up.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
On balance, the internet would be a better place.
Fortran 77 and UCSD Pascal on DEC PDP-11/70.
Honeywell teletypes.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
In 1974, GE loaned a Telex terminal to our small-town high school. In advanced math class I got to write Basic programs on paper tape. Made a long distance phone call to run the program on a mainframe, usually once a day. Made me quite careful about syntax errors. I was hooked -- in a few years I had a couple of CS degrees.
Now the high school kids use tiny tablets with more storage, memory, and speed than the mainframes of the '70s. They control undersea submersible vehicles via satellite, real time, from the classroom. It's great! Can't way to see what happens in the next 20 or 40 years.
In summer school during middle school we were introduced to basic on a teletype hooked up to some mainframe. It was good exposure, though taught me little, as a high school freshman we were taught how to break apart a problem into steps and then express them clearly. We did not touch a computer or six weeks, this to me is when I learned to program, we then learned to compile and link in fortan and developed some rudimentary programs. This was followed with some programming in basic on the apple, and some programming for embedded devices,
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
We had TI-99/4a machines and one IBM compatible in jr high (7th-9th) with a class in BASIC on the TI machines. Once we moved over to the HS building we had access to Apple II machines and compatibles (Franklin ACE) and a couple IBM compatibles. Computer classes were limited to BASIC followed by Pascal, both taught on Apple. There was a short lived computer club that explored special topics such as vector graphic programming and Assembly - also Apple II based. Classes were taught by the math department instructors, or two of them at least. Chances are many of them had never used a computer at that time. In hindsight this set us up quite well for the immediate future and even today I use techniques and concepts I learned in those classes. It was less about the languages we were using and more about the planning and problem solving needed to accomplish a task. I apply similar techniques to problems that I use Powershell or Perl to deal with today. Truthfully most of our time in the "computer lab" was spent hacking around with computers, dot matrix printers, a couple of paddles connected to one of the Apple machines, and bootlegging games. Adventure games and the Atari catalog were the most popular. Somewhere at the bottom of a box in someone's attic is a copy of Jungle Hunt that displays my name in the copyright field. Hex editors were fun.
I learned that at the most inopportune moments computers wouldn't open pod bay doors or cancel self-destruct sequences.
Wow, you lucked out.
At my high school, class of '04, the best computer class they had was for MS Office. The only mandatory class was for typing -- which I was still forced to take despite doing ~90wpm from programming. Both of these classes were taught by the home ec / career counseling teacher, who was pretty clueless about computers.
I've never thought about it before, but my elementary and middle schools had far better options. Both were taught by true computer enthusiasts -- in elementary (1-5) I got my first taste of coding/logic with HyperCard, and in middle (6-8) my teacher let me teach the class HTML and some Javascript. We made the school's first CD yearbook.
The difference you get when a school is willing to hire a teacher who actually knows and enjoys what they're doing is incredible.
There was no mention of computers in any class.
Just one data point.
I was in high school from 1979-1983. My junior or senior year I took a couple of elective computer classes offered for advanced high school students through the junior college downtown. We mostly learned BASIC, which we ran on the motley assortment of equipment the instructor could get his hands on: a TRS-80 Model 1, an Apple ][ plus, and a couple of dumb terminals that logged into the college's DEC PDP via acoustic-coupled modems. Since we didn't have enough terminals/computers for each student, we wrote out our programs on notebook paper and took turns typing them in, then printing them for the teacher to look over and grade. We did a project with punch cards (I think it might have been a Fortran program), mostly because the equipment was available, and some shops still used them. It wasn't until I saved up my money to buy an Atari 400, and then went to college to study Computer Science that I had regular access to a computer. So I was a member of the last generation to first learn to use computers as an "adult" (or near enough).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The tech curriculum at my high school (Northcote College, in Auckland, New Zealand) is rather advanced compared to some others I've seen. First years get a half-year compulsory course, which covers some aspects of Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash, as well as the good old Microsoft Office skillset. From second year onwards, it's all optional.
Second-year course (which is a full-year course) covers the same stuff as first-year, but more web stuff using Dreamweaver, basic CSS, more Photoshop, less Flash. It also dabbles in VB.NET programming.
Third-year (NCEA Level One) is a full-year course which does more web stuff, and much much much more VB.NET (it's all relatively simple stuff though. writing a small list sorting algorithm is amongst what has to be done).
Fourth and fifth year (NCEA L2 and L3 respectively) I don't know anything about, because I'm only a third-year and haven't done any of those courses yet ;)
It's all kind of basic, though. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, VB.NET. I refused to use Dreamweaver in my courses and started using Sublime Text instead :D
I graduated in 1975 when dinosaurs and the Bee Gees roamed the earth. School was boring, so I read science fiction in study hall - about one paperback every day or so. I read the hilariously dated "When Harlie was One" by David Gerrold in 1973, which is where I first learned what a computer virus was. I used to try and discuss them with fellow students and professors all the way until the 80s, but nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about. The few that could grasp the concept didn't believe it ("Why would anyone do THAT?"). Worse, the girls were thoroughly unimpressed. While the latter is still true, I sound a lot smarter these days.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
In the US, in the 80s and 90s (at least, in my experience), computers were monochrome Apple IIs and eventually Macintosh SEs and they were only used for teaching students how to type (up until the fifth grade), except for the one in the library, which was used for looking up stuff on an encyclopedia on CD. If there was one in the classroom, it was usually used for one student per class (rotated through) to play Oregon Trail or this game I can't really remember that had something to due with dolphins becoming president.
Oh, wait. In middle school we had Commodores in the computer lab. Again, only used to teach kids how to type.
One of my teachers in high school brought boxes of punchcards to class and taught us how to read them. We each got a few hundred blank cards each and used the points of our compasses to "write" our first programs (I did a Fibonacci sequencer).
All of the punched cards were taken to the University, which promptly (actually a few weeks later) sent us back a sheet of paper each, explaining why our programs couldn't be run...
A few were allowed to correct their code and have it loaded and run on an actual computer (I think it was a CDC Cyber), including my Fibonacci program. Several weeks after my compass point touched its first chad, I received a fanfold page with the first 20 numbers of the Fibonacci sequence printed on it. I was hooked.
Computing is a little more immediate these days.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
San Diego had a computer science magnet - affiliated with UCSD. I got to toggle boot register on the DEC in the day.
Our exchange student in 81? Markus Hess.
He was later made "famous" by Clifford Stoll...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
In the mid 80's the Jr highschool had maybe 6 apple ][ and about 8 TRS-80 model 1. The high school had two punch card machines and the cards were taken over to the local oil company to run on their Cyber. They didn't want to give us a terminal since they said we would try to hack their system. They were paying something like $750 a month for those keypunch machines. I have never used a keyboard with better feedback.
Since you had a one day turnaround on your assignment, it taught you to be very careful about getting things to run the first time.
At some point we ended up with an IBM PC (not an XT) and one of the music students was doing a report on computer music. I helped her write "99 bottles of beer on the wall", loaded it up with a large starting point and let it go early in the morning. At lunch time I was asked if I knew how to stop it since they were worried about breaking their newest computer.
About 1983 the high school ended up with the TRS-80s model 1 and few model 3 and networked apples running UCSD Pascal. At that point they started running 3 beginning classes a day as well as and advanced class and the other two times were used as an intro where they would being in some class like history or home ec they would use the computer for something that was mostly a waste of time.
The intro classes were in basic and would start out with "write a program to count from 20 to 4 with only even numbers" and later would involve a check balance program where you had to enter how many of each type of coin you had as well as any deposits and checks and it would give you a grand total. They were simple enough that by the time I graduated, I had a basic program that would complete all of the assignments once the description was entered.
The advanced class would do group projects. One project was a computer matching system that was used as a fund raiser. The problem is the 2nd guy in the team (and id #1) knew how to answer the questions so he matched most girls. I was user id #0 and an off by one bug led to some embarrassing results.
In about 1973 the local education authority for my school bought a HP 9830A. It's less of a computer, more of a jumped up calculator, but was programmable in Basic. We had it for half a term, then it went on to the next school. A year or so later, we got it permanently. None of the teachers knew what to do with it, but I latched on to it, and it being a boarding school I was able to play with it in the evenings. I taught myself from the manual, and wrote a noughts and crosses program. Other pupils joined me, and we ended up writing a program to analyse the alignment of stone circles in Cumbria and compare the number of ley lines that could be drawn through them with randomly generated positions. We went on to enter and do well in both a Computer Weekly "Win a Computer" competition and the BBC "Young Scientists of the Year".
Our highschool here runs the small schools program, and my son is enrolled in the liberal arts school. It's his freshman year, and IMO our tech curriculum is pretty kick-ass. Not only did he cover the basics of computers, technology, and programming in middle school already - but for the next four years he's able to take game development classes focusing on Unity. Way, way better than what we were rocking in the PC Jr. days when my gym teacher and my computer teacher had about the same technical skill set.
I am 49; my family moved to Palo Alto in 1972, while in 4th grade. They took us to a room with teletypes (hooked up to a HP 2000 computer) and let us play games on them (Hunt the Wumpus, Hammurabi, etc). In the 5th grade they taught us BASIC in math class (this was back in the days of "new math", which I had no problems with, and am quite thankful for). About this time, I discovered my father was a computer programmer, and decided that was what I was going to do ("You mean they pay people to do this?"). He made some not entirely successful efforts to teach me assembly and COBOL.
In 7th grade honors math class, we learned Minitran (a FORTRAN dialect), from which I learned that programming on punch cards sucked (you submit the program, a week later you get the result back, which usually contained a syntax error). Another student taught a class to his fellow nerds on assembly programming; we had some kind of special nerd room at our middle school which was supervised by Joan Targ (sister of Bobby Fischer, and wife of the infamous SRI psychic researcher Russell Targ; the SRI "ESP testing machine" developed at great cost, and described in The Amazing Randi's book on Uri Geller, was in this room and we played around with it all the time. There was also an unused old analog computer, to which we would randomly plug in banana cables). Jonesing for more computer time, I would hang out at my dads office when I visited him, and also at a local computer store.
By my freshman year in high school (1976), we got access to the school district HP 3000 computer; however the computer lab was closed all year because the current crop of nerds had hacked the machine so badly, they decided to wait for them all to graduate before letting students back on the machine. In my sophomore year they lets us into the computer lab, now outfitted with VDTs and 1200 baud modems (speedy!). I took the only computer programming course, taught by some math teacher, and already knew more than he did so I dropped that. Maybe the year after that, I was put in some kind of program where I went to various places after school (different Stanford labs, once at Xerox Parc) and someone would say "OK kid, why don't you write a program that does this..." and I was exposed to C, assembly, PL/Z, APL and Logo. Back at school, I made an attempt to learn SPL3000, which was hampered by a lack of manuals, or any documentation, so I looked at hex dumps of a library binary to try and figure out how to make function calls. Later we got some early personal computers, I think they were Northstars.
We had an IBM 1130 computer in my senior year. Previous years, I'm told, we had teletypes and access to the Xerox mainframe at West Chester State, but I didn't get interested until 12th grade, so I only knew the 1130. I believe it was a model 3B with the internal disc cartridge drive, 1403 model 7 printer, 1442 card reader/punch.
The Computer Science course taught us basic programming in FORTRAN IV. There was a "computer math" course by a different teacher; I don't know anything about the course, but the teacher was the guy running the whole show, including the computer club, so I knew him anyway. Most of what we did in the computer club amounted to fooling around a lot in APL and learning more detail about how the computer worked.
Bonus: The computer science teacher was young, cute, female, and single. :)
And please. I know I set myself up for a pun. Note that I spelled "basic" in all lower case. I obviously am not speaking of the programming language. Thank you.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/1130/1130_intro.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
Upon finishing secondary school in 2006, I don't recall having being taught anything other than how to use Microsoft Office.
I'm 25 years old. Back when I was in school, it was customary to brain-damage children with BASIC (or VB).. At my first school it once got to a point of teacher giving a task, me telling him "you know I can do that" and just playing, since by then I knew it well enough just from personal experiments. It was not very educative.
Then I got into a math school, and the teacher there, who is also teaching at math department of the Moscow State University, had a different idea, and I am very grateful for that. He taught us Perl and TeX, something that still helps me a lot.
I don't have a super old school story to tell, but me and my friends, we often think of ourselves as one of the last generations that didn't grow up with the Internet and computers surrounding every aspect of life. I'm 24 now and went through the public school system in Ontario, Canada between 1994 until 2005.
br> Around the age of five, my dad brought home a 486 DX with 8 MB of RAM. I quickly became the primary user of it. There were computers at school, even as early as second grade, but it was primarily a toy for learning math, playing with art programs, using Microsoft Works, and learning typing. In the second grade I had a reputation in class for being extremely proficient with the keyboard. I think I hit maybe 40-50 WPM, which was impressive for my age back then. Nothing really interesting happened with computers throughout elementary school.
Then in middle school, I was at a school kind of reputed for technology. We played with Flash, a lot of MS Office, and a lot of CorelDRAW, which was kind of like Adobe Illustrator. There was a 'web team' extracurricular activity, which consisted of maybe the top ten to fifteen computer geeks of the middle school. That was mainly doing a little bit of HTML and a Macromedia Dreamweaver. And a lot of Unreal Tournament in our off time. We got to stay out of the cold winters in the computer lab to play with computers. Around this time I was experimenting with Linux at home so I would often putty to my home machine and go on IRC, which lead most classmates to think I was some sort of computer hacker.
In high school, computer classes was actually a kind of step back compared to middle school. I don't think the mandatory classes ever went beyond MS Office. We also did some research for science classes and such using computer. In grade 11 was when you could actually take a course called "Computer Science." My teacher taught us Visual Basic. The focus was making a usable UI most of the time. Rarely was there any math or any theoretical CS involved. It seemed like the provincial curriculum didn't really specify what exactly this course was meant to teach because a friend at another school was learning basic AI concepts and programmed a tic-tac-toe game.
By the end of high school, the closest thing to real computer science we had done was a VB6 program was computed steps in the Goldbach Conjecture. Anyone who was truly interested in computer science had self-learned skills that far outstripped the curriculum. When I entered university as a computer science student, the difference was staggering. I had probably been in the top three most respected computer geeks in high school, but I was absolutely average when I reached my university. I thought I was a real ace at computer science before, but there, I realized I had only been a child who had just experimented with programming in utterly nonsensical approaches...