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Hour of Code 2015 Star Wars Tutorial: Spare the IF Statement, Spoil the Child?
theodp writes: Teaching U.S. K-12 kids their programming fundamentals in past Hours of Code were an IF-fy Bill Gates and a LOOP-y Mark Zuckerberg. Interestingly, the new signature tutorial — Star Wars: Building a Galaxy with Code — created by Lucasfilm and Code.org ("in a locked room with no windows") for this December's Hour of Code, eschews both IF statements and loops. The new learn-to-code tutorial instead elects to show students "events" after they've gone through the usual move-up-down-left-right drills. With the NY Times and National Center for Women & Information Technology recently warning against putting Star Wars in the CS classroom ("Attracting more female high school students to computer science classes might be as easy as tossing out the Star Wars posters," claimed an Aug. 29th NCWIT Facebook post), the theme of the new tutorial seems an odd choice for Code.org, whose stated mission includes "increasing [CS] participation by women." But if Star Wars is, as some suggest, more aimed at boys, perhaps Code.org has something up its sleeve for girls (a la last year's Disney Princesses) with another as yet unannounced signature tutorial that it teased would be "just as HUGE" as the Star Wars one. Any guesses on what that might be?
"Attracting more female high school students to computer science classes might be as easy as tossing out the Star Wars posters,"
Excuse me, but by that warped sexist logic, just throw out the computers entirely! Replace them with stoves and dish racks!
Literal WTF
Wow, 13 freakin' links ... like anybody reads the articles now.
Is there an actual article in there somewhere?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I realize that some social engineers want this done, and that certain agencies make money selling the fantasy (media). Teaching someone to code does not make them a programmer. No, it does not make them a better person. No, it does not make them responsible or moral. What it does do is try to flood the market with cheap labor, and make a zombie force that can't think very well for themselves.
Just say "NO" to social engineers working for the ultra wealthy!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
if (!programLogic.Contains("if"))
{
_isTrivial = true;
}
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I'm married with three daughters, and all the women and girls in this house like Star Wars.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Wait, coding without If or Loops? What madness designed for a extra high level language is this? Damn. I am sure some of you here learned to code long before I did using who knows what - an abacus or something. But when I learned to code, and If statement was something pretty low level - we used things like cmp and je, jne, jl, etc. Yep, old school and close to the processor. Now they want to use an EVENT instead of an IF? Is that how the Oracle (Sun) JRE was written? It would explain why it is so slow...
Apparently this would be a shock to the submitter, but event-driven programming is a common paradigm these days. This isn't some goofy new thing invented for this tutorial, it is a quite useful standard practice in the code bases I've been working on for the last decade. Admittedly, all of the intro to programming things I'm aware of start with if statements and then loops and take quite a while to get to why an event-based control flow can be useful, but I'm not shocked by it; for the example in the screenshot, being event-driven is the right way to deal with user input...
Moreover, "star wars isn't for girls"? Did the submitter not look at their own screenshot of princess Leia? Has the submitter not seen any of the trailers showing that one of the stars of the new starwars movie is female?
2014: Promotional campaign using mass-media characters targeted at girls. Media narrative: is it acceptable to expose kids to commerically-owned media franchises in an educational context?
2015: Promotional campaign using mass-media characters targeted at boys. Media narrative: is it acceptable to expose kids to educational content that might be oriented towards boys?
Conclusion: Narratives regarding possible female exclusion trump allegations of corporate mass-media meddling. Useful information for CorpComm professionals.
I for one welcome our new GOTO overlords!
DO Kiss your Privacy Goodbye WHILE Using Facebook
IF Windows 10 THEN Microsoft uploads your personal information
FOR Google App in List of Apps Let x = Another 10 million users bought and sold to highest bidder
Just that many more people to be displaced by H1Bs after they put in the effort to get their employer's IT infrastructure stood up. Of course, they have the benefit of being able to scream sexual discrimination and file class action lawsuits...
I mean teaching people to use highly abstract concepts like events before they have mastered basic control flow is certainly the path to their developing a greater understanding.
STUPID!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
another as yet unannounced signature tutorial that it teased would be "just as HUGE" as the Star Wars one. Any guesses on what that might be?
No idea what it could be.
I'm never going to get this.
I'll get this when hell's FROZEN over.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
As a university student, it has seemed to me that among my friends, there are more girls excited/talking about the new star wars movie coming out than guys.... Maybe this just applies to millenials? I mean, my 5 year old sister likes disney princesses, but....
"eschews both IF statements and loop"
"using popular culture to make the uninterested interested"
This is not how to learn coding.
Here's a thought:
Give them a problem they actually want and need to solve.
Then give them a basic overview and explanation of how a certain programming tool might solve it and which functions will be most useful.
Give them the manual to the language and set them loose.
...it's 50 Shades of Code.
I think there's an error in the problem specification for this puzzle. Nice job giving the prospective programmer a realistic view of the industry.
https://studio.code.org/s/star...
If you add only 100 points for each pilot (per the instructions), that makes 300 points, which the tutorial deems a failure.
-Dave
Nothing like a link to a single person's opinion piece for your "as some suggest."
Well, as I am a single person with an opinion:
As some suggest , perhaps it would be more appropriate to reference a person about women in STEM fields who didn't actually eschew the STEM fields herself as shown in her own About Page on her own site. From the linked page:
"After a brief “character-building” stint as a pre-medical student marked most notably by a year of organic chemistry, I decided to give up the sciences and turned to writing full-time."
Yes, this seems to be *the* person I would quote as an authority about women in STEM fields (as some suggest).
...the power of the Dark Side of the FORTH.
I'd prefer a white room with black curtains at the station.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Kind of sexist?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Am I the only one who thinks theodp is a lunatic? How does his posts always get to the front page?
Obviously, the real solution is to get women more interested in Star Wars - which thankfully I think J.J. Abrams might be accomplishing.
Then the Star Wars posters will be an attractant. In fact any uptick in female interest of programming is probably directly attributable to Rebels.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
no ifs allowed buddy
Um, I would hypothesize that there is correlation between liking Sci-Fi and liking technology and coding that has nothing to do with gender.
Gosh, why don't we focus on poetry instead of tools in shop class? BECAUSE IT'S SHOP CLASS.
You might get a few unusual suspects to come to the first week of shop class if it's focused on cake-making, too. But eventually the tools will come out and at that point you'll still lose anyone that wasn't in it for the hardware and banging.
Same thing goes for IT and STEM in general. It is what it is. Geeks like it. Geek women like it. They also like films and bits of pop culture that are full of technology and physics and stuff. Downplay that all you want, but at the end of the day, it is what it is. Hanging a bunch of photos of flowers and unicorns in programmer school is not going to keep the flower-and-unicorn set there once the homework begins.
I read the Fortune article linked from the Facebook post and it's pretty flawed. It's based on simply asking teen girls if some art and flowers in the classroom would make them more likely to enroll in computer science classes. Of course they said yes. That has shit all to do with whether they'd actually do it, or whether they'd actually stay in computer science class once they got there. Clearly not. Anyone that is swayed to choose their courses by the presence of art and flowers in the classroom (or that concedes so easily to a survey like this one) is not likely IMO to stick around and become a computing professional through years of staring at a screen all day, or to hang tough through the related homework.
Silly stuff.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
While I agree with what you said, there is a valid "more advanced" reason to avoid conditionals with many languages; if your conditionals are such that you're checking against a set of attributes or behaviors consistently, it might be better to remove the conditional and use a polymorphic object in place of the 'if ... then' or 'case' statements.
This is, of course, provided that the language that you are using has an object model that makes this possible, easy, and more legible than the conditionals. I doubt kids learning how to code are receptive to this though as most junior programmers aren't ready to make this leap.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Why not simply define "if" as a function?
https://wiki.haskell.org/If-then-else
Tried the "ages 6-10" pathway, and a positive thing I can say is that it uses the a MIT Scratch-like programming language for the coding challenges (giving credit to Harvard and Berkley...), which I think is a great idea for introducing coding concepts to people not familiar with the traditional languages yet.
There are 15 levels and every few levels there is a video message from someone involved in star wars talking about the movies (nice ad placement, btw) or about javascript (which makes no sense to include on the "ages 6-10" visual code based track). There is even a button to show the "underlying code" which shows some javascript commands that don't quite implement the same thing that the user has created in the block-based language.
Worse, it's not a game of puzzles of slowly increasing difficulty that must be solved by increasingly clever code. Instead it's 15 challenges of almost zero difficulty, used as a tutorial for a small number of code elements before dumping the user into a sandbox to "create their own game."
It's clearly written to appeal not to 6-10 year-olds, but to education activists in the education activist conference circuit (i.e. not actual educators in actual classrooms).
I realize it's only an hour, but wouldn't "getting kids interested in code" be better served by creating more games that rely on "code-thinking" to solve? A game like "Human Resources Machine" but with a shallower difficulty ramp-up (and a concept of functions, and disguising some of the tasks to have more rewarding results) would, I think, be far more enticing to children of varying exposure to programming than an overblown Disney/Javascript ad. As would a Scratch-based update to the classic robowar-type games (codecombat.com does something somewhat similar with javascript, which I think is too text-y for young children), but without exposing new users to an online community of already-mature robot designs.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!