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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
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...
.....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."
We had a different kind of computer lab. When I was in 2nd grade or so (1992) we had a computer bus. It was a school bus converted to a lab with around 25 apple ]['s on it and would travel to all the elementary schools in the district (district had around 3000 kids total at the time give or take I believe) We would mainly use it to do math games at the time and the greatest days of the school year were when we got to play oragon trail. I got my first dos based system the next year and started learning the ins and outs.
When we hit middleschool (96) they had just done an upgrade to their network running the latest and greatest compaqs loaded with windows 95. non green screens? to most in the school this was unheard of as the majority would have only used the machines in the previously mentioned computer bus up until this point. The only problem with this was that it was new. The teachers had no idea what they were doing there was 1 "computer guy" at the school and no real management other than 3rd party support. Thats where the geeks came in. myself and a few others who were messing around for a few years at this point had more access to the machines than the principal of the school. We were given full access to everything because we were "so smart" because we could install a printer driver or "log in". It was great learning the ins and outs of an entire network as up until this point I had only had my single machine to hold me over.
Than around the time the original imac came out, someone convinced the school to order those to replace our highschools perfectly fine dell network. It turned into a disaster att he time because they only replaced maybe a dozen of the 40 or so machines in the labs. It would not have been too big of a deal but around this point in time they were becoming more strict about who had any access to the network and the new computer people were, well computer people and wanted to do everything their way. A mixed environment, around that period of time was not a pleasent experience, the printer was always out of order and had memory overloads (who thought sending 40 computers work to a printer with 400K of memory at the same time was a good idea, ill never know) Wireless was new technology being touted as the future for everything IP6 was coming to the masses within the next 2 years...10 years ago.
so other than sparking my interest with the apple ][ in 1st or 2nd grade, I along with the other 4 or 5 geeks pretty much taught my teachers about comptuers, not the other way around
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Fortran 77 and UCSD Pascal on DEC PDP-11/70.
Honeywell teletypes.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
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..."