Such a lovely idea, integrating with the native peoples. Surely they will welcome the strange newcomers with open arms, rather than with spears through their intestines.
Just a thought... you might have them observe and catalogue every aspect of campus, especially those which may change over time. Granted, this would probably be much more interesting for a bio class than for physics, but still...
Some things that could be tracked:
Length of grass in different parts of campus (different patches of a field, between classrooms, growing in cracks)
Where shadows hit at different times of day throughout the year
Weather conditions -- temperature, rainfall, wind
Electromagnetic spectral characteristics (e.g. UV radiation, strength of different radio frequencies) at different locations
Soil Samples
Biological samples, both macro and micro, in different areas at different times of year
How high different types of things bounce at different places from different heights
Where birds hang out, when they hang out, how many of them there are and of what types
What all sorts of items are made of... how heavy, how dense, how it reacts to water, heat, impact, wind.
How fast the teacher's hair grows
What color different parts of different buildings are (to track fading)
In essence, have the students create an extensive longitudinal almanac on every last corner of campus. Then you might take it a step further by seeing if they notice correlations by comparing one set of data to another, both with different data sets over the same time, and in comparison to previous years.
It would demonstrate that science is relevant to everything around them all the time, not just what's on the science shelf in a classroom. Could also bring up interesting discussions, e.g. causation vs. correlation. Also, they'd be studying and taking data on a particular location that otherwise isn't. Not relevant to the big picture? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Someone might indeed wish to use the data points at some time in the future, or you may stumble upon surprising results yourself, or find ways that something on campus could be improved. Could be extra cool if you collaborated with other schools in the area or in different parts of the world.
If you want to get all scientific-methody about it, you could have everyone brainstorm a bunch of hypotheses at the start of the year, then see which hold up with the aggregation of all the data collected.
Don't know how well this would go over with very STAY IN YOUR CLASSROOMS high schools, but it's a thought.
Worked well for me, but I had a microbiologist mom and civil engineer dad. If I was on my own for the science fair, I'd probably have tested Duracell vs. Energizer like 80% of the projects.
Then there's the other end of the spectrum. Check out some of the old-guard museums in Europe some time. Newer ones have friendlier exhibits, but some of them are WAY hardcore, or at least they were not too long ago. In the mid 90s I was in Vienna at the ripe old age of 12. We went to a big fancy museum (I want to say the National Museum, or it could have been Natural History... I don't recall, I was 12). They had some newer exhibits that they tended to usher people towards, which I recall having perusal-friendly displays. Then they had enormous rooms where just things were on display, labeled. Like minerals. Big room, probably 10,000 square feet (maybe overestimating... 12 years old, remember), with nothing but individually labeled minerals. Not what they're for, not where they're found, just minerals and their names. That's... interesting... I guess... if you're into that. What's in the next room? ANOTHER big room, probably 10,000 square feet, with nothing but individually labeled minerals. I want to say there was a third, but my memory is hazy. Similar rooms existed for other things too, IIRC.
Yeah, I haven't had the heart to go back since the new one opened. I think I actually cried when they closed it. The promotions made it look awful. While construction was ongoing, they had a pretty decent display of other things (chickens hatching, air pollution, mass transit) in a temporary annex in the parking lot, but that's probably down now too.
Great memories of that place. All I remember of the main building was a bunch of kinda oldish-looking exhibits, though I think either upstairs or downstairs was a model train room, and one time they had one of the robots from Short Circuit chatting about. The hall to the side had all the good stuff... the math and probability room, the robots-building-bicycles display that would CAD you a custom bike drawing, touchscreen displays (this was 1987), fun with magnets and electricity and so on... I'd beg my parents to take me there on weekends; we probably went a few times a year (it helped that my dad's a museum addict). I think I may have even ended up in some promotional video that I never saw, as they were filming when a friend and I were playing a maze game against a computer AI. It was hardly fair... the joystick was broken and wouldn't move left.
Found a link to a retrospective of the museum... guess the Mathematica section had been around a while... http://www.concentric.net/~Whmsicl/CMSI.html -- someone on the message boards claims it lives in New York now.
I about screamed when I read someone on the internets recently comparing something to a moebius strip because you can't get to both sides of it, instantly knowing they were full of BS as I remembered seeing the little arrow on a track at the museum.
I remember the big box with pegs and a bell curve. One lived in L.A. for quite a few years. Last I saw, it (and the accompanying whole room's worth of other cool things) had moved to Seattle.
I was forced to take history classes where we learned mostly folklore and propagandized stories that I then had to unlearn when I got to university level. I hardly see how programming is more of a waste of time.
For what it's worth, I learned cross-stitching in 4th grade. Everyone in class did. I think it was largely a way to keep us busy and quiet when we finished our work early. And, given that it was more engaging than most of our lessons, I'd do my work more eagerly and enthusiastically because I knew that I could get back to making that bookmark for Mother's Day when I finished.
Looking back on a lot of school, my memories are of dozing off, daydreaming, doodling, reading books, and disassembling and reassembling pens. I can guarantee that there are some general-skills classes that I got nothing whatsoever out of directly (i.e. I didn't retain anything about the California missions an hour after the exam), but that I probably did get a lot out of tangentially (i.e. I became really good at reading maps, because they were the only thing in the text that didn't suck). Most of my learning didn't come from what was being taught at me, but from what I picked up on the side, and I probably got more out of all the posters on the walls (I had them memorized) than out of all the words in the textbooks (I skimmed for boldface words, if I opened the books at all). In that regard, I think that engagement of the students and availability of in-depth study is the most important factor, rather than whether you spend ALL the math time on countless pages of long division practice, or just half on that and the other half on some vaguely math-related topic that might get them actually interested in the material.
As for "precious school time," the system is largely glorified babysitting. If we were to honestly look at how much time of the day is spent with the students engaged in learning vs. bored out of their minds, counting every last second until the clock strikes recess, lunch, or the end of the day, I think we'd find that we could accomplish a lot more in a lot less time, IF the teachers are both competent in the subjects they're teaching AND (and here's the tricky bit) allowed to do their jobs without government agencies and parents' groups poking their noses in and chaining them down. Decreasing the school day might also do something about this obesity epidemic we hear so much about.
On the contrary. Programming is applicable in that much of it is applicable to a deeper understanding of math, as well as different approaches of such concepts as sorting, logic, optimization, planning, decision-making, etc. At more advanced levels of math, there becomes more overlap in relevance. Teaching concepts of programming can be very useful in unexpected ways.
I agree that *some* programming skills are largely non-transferable trade skills... parsing markup languages, creating DLL interfaces, learning protocols to interact with DirectX, creating database tables. However, there is also a great deal that provides a different way of thinking and of approaching problems. I think that making this distinction and being selective about concepts that are actually useful and transferable would be the key to whether this curriculum is relevant and successful.
I think there *should* be a more varied approach to a lot of subjects in school. So much of our educational system is centered around "you sit there and shut up while I say something at you, after which you will repeat it to me at a later date," which I find woefully ineffective for actual learning (especially when the teachers hardly understand the material themselves). Giving a starting point down a path that students might actually find interesting may, *gasp*, actually inspire them to learn things on their own. I'd say that learning to change chemicals in a pool could be a fascinating science lesson, teaching about pH and solubility and chemical interactions. Perhaps it would inspire students to become chemists. A whole semester or year of programming might be a bit of overkill for the general curriculum (or it may not), but I think that some exposure would be very valuable.
A lot of the things I learned came back in unexpectedly relevant forms. For example, I always thought that the emphasis in second grade of "1572 is 1 thousand, 5 hundreds, 7 tens, and 2 ones" was a complete and utter waste of time. Until my second algorithms class, where we were making enormously large numbers stored in base-2^32 and converting them into decimal output.
On the contrary, the significance of the number three is much older indeed than baseball.
For example:
then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.
We're a close group at work, and all get along pretty well and like working there, but people do move on from time to time. About a year ago, a friend sent a company-wide email with the topic "Out of Office", which is usually used if someone's emailing in sick or going on vacation. Took about an hour before someone actually read the email and saw that he would be out... permanently.
Now everyone reads all the vacation emails carefully, just in case.
The email has become tradition, with every subsequent departure using the same message, verbatim, changing only one thing... the first email said that he hoped the people at his new job would be half as cool; the next said one fourth, then one eighth, etc.
If Windows would impose a limit preventing all those useless helper apps from running, I'd consider it a feature and may forego upgrading from Starter Edition.
Fair enough. If I spent the afternoon trying to count them, the number would probably be around 5. So I exaggerated a bit. Although each of those had its share of sub-headaches.
I think it's a psychological irritation more than anything else. If I MUST use an application and MUST use Vista and the two will not work together, then it's a done deal. I fail. I can't do it. I can then sheepishly tell the client that it's a no-go. We move on.
With./configure, it may very well be that the two things I'm trying to run together are not capable of running together. Or maybe they are. I never know, but I always have hope. Hope that strings me along for 30 hours of trial and error, at the end of which I'm fairly convinced that it's not going to work, but I also think that it still *could* work. So I keep plugging away at it, or I admit defeat and feel like an incompetent fool (and perhaps I am).
So while it's not really a happy situation, I am significantly less crazy when confronted with a 100% guaranteed "this will never work" failure immediately that I can move on from, than a "this should work, but it's not working" that strings me along for days. As an added bonus, if enough people are confronted with a 100% guaranteed "this will never work" and are all pissed off about it, chances are someone will find a way to make it work and try to sell it to me in the near future. If a./configure doesn't work, it tends to be isolated to my particular strange configuration or ignorance, and help is not to be found.
I have had countless nightmares with./configure && make && make install.
There are often a bunch of options that I'm supposed to magically be aware of to send to./configure, many of which I don't become aware of until two months down the line when some critical feature doesn't work, and I'm forced to keep re-configuring and re-configuring until it works properly, seriously hosing my system in the process. I will never install apache again without a package manager.
Windows isn't without its dependency issues, but they are far less frequent, largely due to many applications bringing their own copy of dependencies with them.
The package management systems work fine... IF the package I want is in the repository. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I sometimes want applications and versions that aren't in the repository. Maybe I'm just not comfortable with some Linux "sorry, you can't have that version yet" philosophy, even though that version is publicly released and its website offers manual installation instructions. I grew up on Windows, where if an application is available, I can install it right away. If I need that feature now and there's no package, what are my choices that don't involve destabilizing my package dependencies?
Unless the "common system" is the kernel, this is a problem in design of either the package management system or the particular packages.
It's usually a problem between the repositories and the application in my experience. Scenarios that make this happen:
I need a feature that is present in a new version of an application. There is no package available for that version in my distro's repositories.
An application has been abandoned by developers, but I still use it. A new feature of a package it depends on breaks backward compatibility. Therefore, to keep my app working, a dependency can no longer be updated. Now I have another application that needs the NEW version of the dependency. I can't have both.
There is an application that does not have packages for my distro. It depends on something that DOES have packages in my distro.
My choices tend to be hacking it together until it works, or waiting indefinitely in hopes that someone will assemble an appropriate package. The former tends to weaken my system's continuity. The latter tends to not let me run software.
No, no responsibility exists at all, in any situation - I can produce either a free or a pay for product, and I can happily walk away from it at any point, taking with me my tools and code and no responsibility to support you exists at all.
You, sir, are the reason for the screaming noises emanating from my office on a daily basis. You are correct, but you are the reason for my screaming nonetheless.
Yes, and shame on me for using RHEL, naively assuming that a distribution backed by a corporation and subscription fees would have its repository pegged to non-ancient versions of things. It's a mistake I won't make again.
Insofar as that's true, you don't really need a common distribution to address that, a common package management system that can handle building and installing source-base packages would be sufficient.
Yes, and that works great, in theory. However, once you want to install an app that the repository doesn't have (or doesn't have the version you need), things begin to break down. They break down doubly fast if your app needs a different version of something your package manager has already installed. In Linux, two different applications that depend on two different versions of a common system can ruin continuity.
I agree that, as long as the package manager has all the packages you want, it's a delightful thing. In my experience, though, there's always something it doesn't have. So I either don't install something I want, or I slowly compromise the integrity of the package dependencies. It's also doubly nightmarish running a 64 bit system, as the 32 and 64 bit versions of things tend to step on each other.
I want to love Linux, but Windows never tells me I can't install Word because my version of Windows doesn't have a package for the appropriate version of a font manager.
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Such a lovely idea, integrating with the native peoples. Surely they will welcome the strange newcomers with open arms, rather than with spears through their intestines.
I couldn't help but see the parallels to the "B" Ark. Heck, there was even a bathtub on the bridge!
Was visiting, there three weeks. Have lots of family in Vienna and some surrounding areas.
Some things that could be tracked:
In essence, have the students create an extensive longitudinal almanac on every last corner of campus. Then you might take it a step further by seeing if they notice correlations by comparing one set of data to another, both with different data sets over the same time, and in comparison to previous years.
It would demonstrate that science is relevant to everything around them all the time, not just what's on the science shelf in a classroom. Could also bring up interesting discussions, e.g. causation vs. correlation. Also, they'd be studying and taking data on a particular location that otherwise isn't. Not relevant to the big picture? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Someone might indeed wish to use the data points at some time in the future, or you may stumble upon surprising results yourself, or find ways that something on campus could be improved. Could be extra cool if you collaborated with other schools in the area or in different parts of the world.
If you want to get all scientific-methody about it, you could have everyone brainstorm a bunch of hypotheses at the start of the year, then see which hold up with the aggregation of all the data collected.
Don't know how well this would go over with very STAY IN YOUR CLASSROOMS high schools, but it's a thought.
Worked well for me, but I had a microbiologist mom and civil engineer dad. If I was on my own for the science fair, I'd probably have tested Duracell vs. Energizer like 80% of the projects.
Then there's the other end of the spectrum. Check out some of the old-guard museums in Europe some time. Newer ones have friendlier exhibits, but some of them are WAY hardcore, or at least they were not too long ago. In the mid 90s I was in Vienna at the ripe old age of 12. We went to a big fancy museum (I want to say the National Museum, or it could have been Natural History... I don't recall, I was 12). They had some newer exhibits that they tended to usher people towards, which I recall having perusal-friendly displays. Then they had enormous rooms where just things were on display, labeled. Like minerals. Big room, probably 10,000 square feet (maybe overestimating... 12 years old, remember), with nothing but individually labeled minerals. Not what they're for, not where they're found, just minerals and their names. That's... interesting... I guess... if you're into that. What's in the next room? ANOTHER big room, probably 10,000 square feet, with nothing but individually labeled minerals. I want to say there was a third, but my memory is hazy. Similar rooms existed for other things too, IIRC.
Hardcore.
Yeah, I haven't had the heart to go back since the new one opened. I think I actually cried when they closed it. The promotions made it look awful. While construction was ongoing, they had a pretty decent display of other things (chickens hatching, air pollution, mass transit) in a temporary annex in the parking lot, but that's probably down now too.
Great memories of that place. All I remember of the main building was a bunch of kinda oldish-looking exhibits, though I think either upstairs or downstairs was a model train room, and one time they had one of the robots from Short Circuit chatting about. The hall to the side had all the good stuff... the math and probability room, the robots-building-bicycles display that would CAD you a custom bike drawing, touchscreen displays (this was 1987), fun with magnets and electricity and so on... I'd beg my parents to take me there on weekends; we probably went a few times a year (it helped that my dad's a museum addict). I think I may have even ended up in some promotional video that I never saw, as they were filming when a friend and I were playing a maze game against a computer AI. It was hardly fair... the joystick was broken and wouldn't move left.
Found a link to a retrospective of the museum... guess the Mathematica section had been around a while... http://www.concentric.net/~Whmsicl/CMSI.html -- someone on the message boards claims it lives in New York now.
I about screamed when I read someone on the internets recently comparing something to a moebius strip because you can't get to both sides of it, instantly knowing they were full of BS as I remembered seeing the little arrow on a track at the museum.
I remember the big box with pegs and a bell curve. One lived in L.A. for quite a few years. Last I saw, it (and the accompanying whole room's worth of other cool things) had moved to Seattle.
*hangs head in shame*
I was forced to take history classes where we learned mostly folklore and propagandized stories that I then had to unlearn when I got to university level. I hardly see how programming is more of a waste of time.
For what it's worth, I learned cross-stitching in 4th grade. Everyone in class did. I think it was largely a way to keep us busy and quiet when we finished our work early. And, given that it was more engaging than most of our lessons, I'd do my work more eagerly and enthusiastically because I knew that I could get back to making that bookmark for Mother's Day when I finished.
Looking back on a lot of school, my memories are of dozing off, daydreaming, doodling, reading books, and disassembling and reassembling pens. I can guarantee that there are some general-skills classes that I got nothing whatsoever out of directly (i.e. I didn't retain anything about the California missions an hour after the exam), but that I probably did get a lot out of tangentially (i.e. I became really good at reading maps, because they were the only thing in the text that didn't suck). Most of my learning didn't come from what was being taught at me, but from what I picked up on the side, and I probably got more out of all the posters on the walls (I had them memorized) than out of all the words in the textbooks (I skimmed for boldface words, if I opened the books at all). In that regard, I think that engagement of the students and availability of in-depth study is the most important factor, rather than whether you spend ALL the math time on countless pages of long division practice, or just half on that and the other half on some vaguely math-related topic that might get them actually interested in the material.
As for "precious school time," the system is largely glorified babysitting. If we were to honestly look at how much time of the day is spent with the students engaged in learning vs. bored out of their minds, counting every last second until the clock strikes recess, lunch, or the end of the day, I think we'd find that we could accomplish a lot more in a lot less time, IF the teachers are both competent in the subjects they're teaching AND (and here's the tricky bit) allowed to do their jobs without government agencies and parents' groups poking their noses in and chaining them down. Decreasing the school day might also do something about this obesity epidemic we hear so much about.
On the contrary. Programming is applicable in that much of it is applicable to a deeper understanding of math, as well as different approaches of such concepts as sorting, logic, optimization, planning, decision-making, etc. At more advanced levels of math, there becomes more overlap in relevance. Teaching concepts of programming can be very useful in unexpected ways.
I agree that *some* programming skills are largely non-transferable trade skills... parsing markup languages, creating DLL interfaces, learning protocols to interact with DirectX, creating database tables. However, there is also a great deal that provides a different way of thinking and of approaching problems. I think that making this distinction and being selective about concepts that are actually useful and transferable would be the key to whether this curriculum is relevant and successful.
I think there *should* be a more varied approach to a lot of subjects in school. So much of our educational system is centered around "you sit there and shut up while I say something at you, after which you will repeat it to me at a later date," which I find woefully ineffective for actual learning (especially when the teachers hardly understand the material themselves). Giving a starting point down a path that students might actually find interesting may, *gasp*, actually inspire them to learn things on their own. I'd say that learning to change chemicals in a pool could be a fascinating science lesson, teaching about pH and solubility and chemical interactions. Perhaps it would inspire students to become chemists. A whole semester or year of programming might be a bit of overkill for the general curriculum (or it may not), but I think that some exposure would be very valuable.
A lot of the things I learned came back in unexpectedly relevant forms. For example, I always thought that the emphasis in second grade of "1572 is 1 thousand, 5 hundreds, 7 tens, and 2 ones" was a complete and utter waste of time. Until my second algorithms class, where we were making enormously large numbers stored in base-2^32 and converting them into decimal output.
For example:
-Book of Armaments, Chapter 9 (excerpt)
Hopefully they have "finds Subway repulsive" on file for me.
There already is MASSIVE software copyright infringement going on globally. Who really thinks legislation in any shape or form is going to stop that?
I don't think many people think this legislation will stop that, seeing as it deals with patents, not copyrights.
There already is MASSIVE software copyright infringement going on globally. Who really thinks legislation in any shape or form is going to stop that?
this legislation will stop that, seeing as it deals with patents, not copyrights.
We're a close group at work, and all get along pretty well and like working there, but people do move on from time to time. About a year ago, a friend sent a company-wide email with the topic "Out of Office", which is usually used if someone's emailing in sick or going on vacation. Took about an hour before someone actually read the email and saw that he would be out... permanently.
Now everyone reads all the vacation emails carefully, just in case.
The email has become tradition, with every subsequent departure using the same message, verbatim, changing only one thing... the first email said that he hoped the people at his new job would be half as cool; the next said one fourth, then one eighth, etc.
If Windows would impose a limit preventing all those useless helper apps from running, I'd consider it a feature and may forego upgrading from Starter Edition.
Fair enough. If I spent the afternoon trying to count them, the number would probably be around 5. So I exaggerated a bit. Although each of those had its share of sub-headaches.
./configure, it may very well be that the two things I'm trying to run together are not capable of running together. Or maybe they are. I never know, but I always have hope. Hope that strings me along for 30 hours of trial and error, at the end of which I'm fairly convinced that it's not going to work, but I also think that it still *could* work. So I keep plugging away at it, or I admit defeat and feel like an incompetent fool (and perhaps I am).
./configure doesn't work, it tends to be isolated to my particular strange configuration or ignorance, and help is not to be found.
I think it's a psychological irritation more than anything else. If I MUST use an application and MUST use Vista and the two will not work together, then it's a done deal. I fail. I can't do it. I can then sheepishly tell the client that it's a no-go. We move on.
With
So while it's not really a happy situation, I am significantly less crazy when confronted with a 100% guaranteed "this will never work" failure immediately that I can move on from, than a "this should work, but it's not working" that strings me along for days. As an added bonus, if enough people are confronted with a 100% guaranteed "this will never work" and are all pissed off about it, chances are someone will find a way to make it work and try to sell it to me in the near future. If a
I have had countless nightmares with ./configure && make && make install.
./configure, many of which I don't become aware of until two months down the line when some critical feature doesn't work, and I'm forced to keep re-configuring and re-configuring until it works properly, seriously hosing my system in the process. I will never install apache again without a package manager.
There are often a bunch of options that I'm supposed to magically be aware of to send to
Windows isn't without its dependency issues, but they are far less frequent, largely due to many applications bringing their own copy of dependencies with them.
The package management systems work fine... IF the package I want is in the repository. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I sometimes want applications and versions that aren't in the repository. Maybe I'm just not comfortable with some Linux "sorry, you can't have that version yet" philosophy, even though that version is publicly released and its website offers manual installation instructions. I grew up on Windows, where if an application is available, I can install it right away. If I need that feature now and there's no package, what are my choices that don't involve destabilizing my package dependencies?
Unless the "common system" is the kernel, this is a problem in design of either the package management system or the particular packages.
It's usually a problem between the repositories and the application in my experience. Scenarios that make this happen:
My choices tend to be hacking it together until it works, or waiting indefinitely in hopes that someone will assemble an appropriate package. The former tends to weaken my system's continuity. The latter tends to not let me run software.
No, no responsibility exists at all, in any situation - I can produce either a free or a pay for product, and I can happily walk away from it at any point, taking with me my tools and code and no responsibility to support you exists at all.
You, sir, are the reason for the screaming noises emanating from my office on a daily basis. You are correct, but you are the reason for my screaming nonetheless.
Yes, and shame on me for using RHEL, naively assuming that a distribution backed by a corporation and subscription fees would have its repository pegged to non-ancient versions of things. It's a mistake I won't make again.
Insofar as that's true, you don't really need a common distribution to address that, a common package management system that can handle building and installing source-base packages would be sufficient.
Yes, and that works great, in theory. However, once you want to install an app that the repository doesn't have (or doesn't have the version you need), things begin to break down. They break down doubly fast if your app needs a different version of something your package manager has already installed. In Linux, two different applications that depend on two different versions of a common system can ruin continuity.
I agree that, as long as the package manager has all the packages you want, it's a delightful thing. In my experience, though, there's always something it doesn't have. So I either don't install something I want, or I slowly compromise the integrity of the package dependencies. It's also doubly nightmarish running a 64 bit system, as the 32 and 64 bit versions of things tend to step on each other.
I want to love Linux, but Windows never tells me I can't install Word because my version of Windows doesn't have a package for the appropriate version of a font manager.
It's there already.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform (former AS)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (former ES) (limited to 2 CPU-s)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop with Workstation and Multi-OS option
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop with Workstation option (former WS)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop with Multi-OS option
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (former Desktop)
(courtesy Wikipedia)