Why are all cities moving from easy-to-use tokens to these expensive, complicated systems?
Cities move away from tokens to fare cards so they can charge variable rates based on supply and demand. During peak usage, they can make the fee higher and during times of lower ridership, fares can be made cheaper to encourage more ridership. Also general rate hikes cannot be done as quickly with tokens because people can buy a mass of tokens just before the rate hike yet still ride with their pre-hike token after the hike goes into effect.
I took summer school logo class in the late 80's to learn logo and make a lego traffic light built with legos loop in the proper colour sequence.
In middle school we learned Toolbook -- just the language as I recall, not really how to structure software.
I took high school CS classes in the late 90s. Our standard was the AP Computer Science [pdf] curriculum. We learned basic data structures in Pascal and C++ (structs/records, classes, arrays), sorting algorithms, hashing functions. The most valuable part of the class was problem solving. We would get various problems, like write a program that takes an input of the length of a side of a hexagon and draw a hexagon a line at a time with X's. Or output all the permutations of a given input. Or determine the pattern of a given sequence then write a program that outputs the nth number/word in that sequence. Gaining experience solving lots of different computing problems, recognizing patterns and having to do it quickly and 100% accurately was the most valuable part of the class in my opinion.
We learned nothing of database design and extremely light, if anything on software engineering.
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Post hoc ergo propter hoc. q.e.d.
Why are all cities moving from easy-to-use tokens to these expensive, complicated systems?
Cities move away from tokens to fare cards so they can charge variable rates based on supply and demand. During peak usage, they can make the fee higher and during times of lower ridership, fares can be made cheaper to encourage more ridership. Also general rate hikes cannot be done as quickly with tokens because people can buy a mass of tokens just before the rate hike yet still ride with their pre-hike token after the hike goes into effect.
I took summer school logo class in the late 80's to learn logo and make a lego traffic light built with legos loop in the proper colour sequence. In middle school we learned Toolbook -- just the language as I recall, not really how to structure software. I took high school CS classes in the late 90s. Our standard was the AP Computer Science [pdf] curriculum. We learned basic data structures in Pascal and C++ (structs/records, classes, arrays), sorting algorithms, hashing functions. The most valuable part of the class was problem solving. We would get various problems, like write a program that takes an input of the length of a side of a hexagon and draw a hexagon a line at a time with X's. Or output all the permutations of a given input. Or determine the pattern of a given sequence then write a program that outputs the nth number/word in that sequence. Gaining experience solving lots of different computing problems, recognizing patterns and having to do it quickly and 100% accurately was the most valuable part of the class in my opinion. We learned nothing of database design and extremely light, if anything on software engineering.