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My High School CS Homework Is the Centerfold
theodp writes: To paraphrase the J. Geils Band, Maddie Zug's high school computer science homework is the centerfold. In a Washington Post op-ed, Zug, a student at the top-ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, argues that a centerfold does not belong in the classroom. "I first saw a picture of Playboy magazine's Miss November 1972 a year ago as a junior at TJ," Zug explains. "My artificial intelligence teacher told our class to search Google for Lena Soderberg (not the full image, though!) and use her picture to test our latest coding assignment...Soderberg has a history with computer science. In the 1970s, male programmers at the University of Southern California needed to test their image-processing algorithm. They scanned what they had handy: the centerfold of a Playboy magazine. Before long, the image became a convention in industry and academia."
(Wikipedia has a nice background, too.)
You must have conniption fits when you go to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or the Los Angeles County Art Museum's Egyptian section.
Those are not for children, and they don't require mandatory attendance.
Think of the children (TM)....Er... no
I understand that "Think of the children" is a popular meme to dismiss any concern about inappropriate content, but when designing curriculum for children, then thinking of the children is actually the appropriate thing to do.
The problem with that is *something* is *always* offensive to someone.
Except that pornography is offensive to about 50% of the human race.