Like many of the comments have mentioned, fulfilling the general education requirements of a BS degree/will/ make you better at your job. Learning how to think critically about ambiguous problems and how to apply knowledge from a variety of disciplines will make you better at solving the specific problems you face as a programmer. Those creative skills will also help you later in your career by which time you will likely have grown into broader roles that include project and people management.
It's also worth mentioning that the quality and depth of critical analysis possible in college literature and history classes will surpass that of even very good high school programs.
My high school participates in and loses at a smaller, local competition every year. As far as I know, students can work in C++, Pascal, or Basic. They're given a set of problems to play with for several hours. The team with the most correct implementations in the shortest amount of time wins.
My information may be shaky. I have no first hand experience just yet.
I've been fascinated by the peer-to-peer concept for a long time. Like the open source movement peer-to-peer offers every member of a community the chance to contribute to that community the best way they know how. I love to see sites like slashdot, kuro5hin, and metafilter all thrive, it's encouraging to know that people will contribute to a project for no other reason than for the sake of contributing. It's a shame I live on the wrong coast to attend this conference.
Hierarchical business models are clumsy beasts. To have an editor, five assistant editors, a handful of associate editors, a copy editor, a content editor, and a fleet of executive assistants to service them, all just to publish a small document or website is ridiculous. Perhaps some of you aren't yet too old to have forgotten your high school newspapers. Perhaps you were even a part of yours. Weren't they just terrible?
My school is very uptight about controversial opinions being expressed among its students. It offers us an opinion board and a newspaper but it censors both on a very regular basis. The student newspaper is essentially nothing more than a vehicle of propaganda. The opinion board has been partially reclaimed by a band of students who regularly point out the idiocy of the administration and the poor treatment of the students. But still, our administrative staff doesn't like it. They talk amongst themselves of "those unappreciative kids" in the halls.
Many of the frustrated voices in the school community, student and teacher alike, are reaching their breaking point. I've been working hard over the past several weeks to lay the groundwork for a new student newspaper. One developed by and for the so-called counter-culture of the community. I put together an initial team of people whom I believe will best be able to launch the project and since then we've been working on developing a publication and distribution model.
We have no official backing from the school, obviously, and our resources are limited to our home PCs and printers. There is no hierarchy, the entire publication is built on user submission. That means that we have gone out and asked certain individuals in the school community to contribute articles and media to the first edition. It is hoped that after the paper premieres there will be enough interest in the project to generate submissions without our having to beg for them. You see then, that the submission model is very similar to that of slashdot or kuro5hin. A team of moderators would then sort through the submissions and choose the best articles for the text publication. In addition to the text publication there will be an online supplement in which all submissions, even those not included in the text document, will be published.
To print over four hundred copies of a five to ten page document is no small task. We have adapted the idea of distributed processing to this problem. Rather than force one individual to spend the time and money to print four hundred copies we will instead have each contributor print twenty or so copies and then compile each set of twenty into the final group of hundreds.
We have no choice but to distribute the document peer-to-peer. Any other distribution would most likely be against the rules of the school and, of course, we want to obey the rules. This means that everyone, moderators and contributors, will handout copies to people in the school eventually reaching near complete distribution.
And so, after that long-winded and, I'm sure, entirely uninteresting preamble I actually want to pose a question to the slashdot community. What problems do you foresee a project like this facing? What hurdles have other projects based on user submission had to overcome? Is there a significant difference between user submission in real space as opposed to on the web? Is this project even feasible at all? We're really going at this by the seat of our pants, please tell me if you think we're also going ass backwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Like many of the comments have mentioned, fulfilling the general education requirements of a BS degree /will/ make you better at your job. Learning how to think critically about ambiguous problems and how to apply knowledge from a variety of disciplines will make you better at solving the specific problems you face as a programmer. Those creative skills will also help you later in your career by which time you will likely have grown into broader roles that include project and people management.
It's also worth mentioning that the quality and depth of critical analysis possible in college literature and history classes will surpass that of even very good high school programs.
Here's another mirror of the Diebold memos.
It's probably not Kosher but I was able to snag some of the images and mirror them. You can find them here.
You might try the American Computer Science League. Apparently, they specialize in High School level competition.
My high school participates in and loses at a smaller, local competition every year. As far as I know, students can work in C++, Pascal, or Basic. They're given a set of problems to play with for several hours. The team with the most correct implementations in the shortest amount of time wins.
My information may be shaky. I have no first hand experience just yet.
I've been fascinated by the peer-to-peer concept for a long time. Like the open source movement peer-to-peer offers every member of a community the chance to contribute to that community the best way they know how. I love to see sites like slashdot, kuro5hin, and metafilter all thrive, it's encouraging to know that people will contribute to a project for no other reason than for the sake of contributing. It's a shame I live on the wrong coast to attend this conference.
Hierarchical business models are clumsy beasts. To have an editor, five assistant editors, a handful of associate editors, a copy editor, a content editor, and a fleet of executive assistants to service them, all just to publish a small document or website is ridiculous. Perhaps some of you aren't yet too old to have forgotten your high school newspapers. Perhaps you were even a part of yours. Weren't they just terrible?
My school is very uptight about controversial opinions being expressed among its students. It offers us an opinion board and a newspaper but it censors both on a very regular basis. The student newspaper is essentially nothing more than a vehicle of propaganda. The opinion board has been partially reclaimed by a band of students who regularly point out the idiocy of the administration and the poor treatment of the students. But still, our administrative staff doesn't like it. They talk amongst themselves of "those unappreciative kids" in the halls.
Many of the frustrated voices in the school community, student and teacher alike, are reaching their breaking point. I've been working hard over the past several weeks to lay the groundwork for a new student newspaper. One developed by and for the so-called counter-culture of the community. I put together an initial team of people whom I believe will best be able to launch the project and since then we've been working on developing a publication and distribution model.
We have no official backing from the school, obviously, and our resources are limited to our home PCs and printers. There is no hierarchy, the entire publication is built on user submission. That means that we have gone out and asked certain individuals in the school community to contribute articles and media to the first edition. It is hoped that after the paper premieres there will be enough interest in the project to generate submissions without our having to beg for them. You see then, that the submission model is very similar to that of slashdot or kuro5hin. A team of moderators would then sort through the submissions and choose the best articles for the text publication. In addition to the text publication there will be an online supplement in which all submissions, even those not included in the text document, will be published.
To print over four hundred copies of a five to ten page document is no small task. We have adapted the idea of distributed processing to this problem. Rather than force one individual to spend the time and money to print four hundred copies we will instead have each contributor print twenty or so copies and then compile each set of twenty into the final group of hundreds.
We have no choice but to distribute the document peer-to-peer. Any other distribution would most likely be against the rules of the school and, of course, we want to obey the rules. This means that everyone, moderators and contributors, will handout copies to people in the school eventually reaching near complete distribution.
And so, after that long-winded and, I'm sure, entirely uninteresting preamble I actually want to pose a question to the slashdot community. What problems do you foresee a project like this facing? What hurdles have other projects based on user submission had to overcome? Is there a significant difference between user submission in real space as opposed to on the web? Is this project even feasible at all? We're really going at this by the seat of our pants, please tell me if you think we're also going ass backwards.
yay for ultra-mega-mega long posts,
-zak