I teach Computer Science/programmin to 11-18-year-olds in the UK.
It's very easy for any professional or academic to say that everyone should learn C, python, or whatever else. The questions those people should ask themselves is have you actually had to teach those things at that level, and are you aware of all the constraints that the average school pupil, teacher, or network has?
I inherited my first class (16-17 year-olds) who had been learning VB6 for a year and had to stuck with it, I moved the next year group to VB.NET and it worked well. VB.NET, if taught correctly can teach the logic, syntax, and programming concepts needed to start a new project in a new language. Importantly, the majority of pupils from 13+ are able to understand the meaning behind virtually all the code they are writing. I could not say the same thing about teaching C.
The post from the teacher in question is clear: we are not teaching a specific language, whatever that may be, we are teaching the concepts of programming, from procedures, and conditions to data structures and object orientation, in order to solve problems. It's like arguing that teaching pupils the recorder is stupid because they should all learn the cello; if they learn to read and compose music, they can pick up whatever they really want to do later.
There's nothing wrong with using automated marking where it's actually saving time, as long as the results are used to further learning.
The simple idea (employed by the Khan academy and others) is to get students/pupils to practise at home, a system tracks what they can do and what they struggle with, and the teacher-pupil/student-professor contact time is used to address any issues. Grading simple, repetitive tasks is a waste of time if it can be automated; it's the feedback that matters.
I assume that this paper marking thing is able to generate reasons for the grades it gives, and some of that is probably also a little useful.
I assume this special Apple 'Huge Quarter' is essentially the same as any other quarter, but they've polished it up a little and will sell it to you for fifty cents.
Or maybe it's mistyped and Tim Cook has a very spacious cabin on the USS Apple...
I'm a high-school ICT/Computing teaching in the UK (and have been directly involved with some of the discussion with the Royal Society, Prof. Steve Furber and others) and I've been teaching programming and some CS along side ICT for years now.
Even the lowest ability kids can program and enjoy doing it. Nobody's asking 11 year olds to write C++, at that level it's Scratch, Alice and other visual languages that provide quick rewards for the use of a little logic. Every single one of they enjoys learning how to make games. SOme for the result, some for the challenge, but there's not a single one I can think of that resents it. Programming starts to get harder when kids have to write more code (flash/actionscript is a decent next step here) or actually do all the work themselves (VB, Python, C# etc.), and some won't get it, but everyone should have the opportunity to see what's possible
The point of this move IS that everyone should be given a taster of what's possible; nobody's mind is going to be expanded by making PowerPoints, but some of the kids I introduced programming to seven years ago are now off to study CS at Oxford and Cambridge, hopefully to be the next generation of innovators.
Equally, the jobs market is going to keep shifting in its requirement for technical experience: more advanced software, robotics, etc. means unskilled jobs disappear, and highly-skilled tech jobs replace them.
I'm not sure of the definition of doing 'badly' here when the average unemployment rate was 3.8% and the CS unemployment rate was 5.1%. Is just over one percent more graduates not having a job 'performing badly?'
If you actually check the data that the article references, you'll also find that the figures included a very broad range of CS degrees, including any joint degree that includes CS. Also from the article:
It’s not all bad news, 81.5% of computer science graduates were in full time employment four years on from their degree, compared to just 73.2% of all graduates. For maths graduates the figure is 73.1% and for physical science graduates it is just 66.0% – though a whopping 19.8% of them are in full-time education.
As somebody who's currently teaming Computing/Computer Science in the UK to 11-18 year-olds this type of scaremongering is not helpful.
Simple enough: the outside edge of the universe is the point when galaxies stop being there.
You could refer to the 'outside' edge of a town in a similar way; it doesn't mean there's an actual edge, just a point after which you're not really interested.
...is build several, maybe up to one hundred closed structures (to protect the inhabitants from the harsh outdoor climate) and have small communities of around one hundred people in each one, with one individual (some sort of overseer) the whole area. They could test different social situations for each of the groups in large experiments, which go on for several years before the door to the community is opened.
Kind of like a 'vault' for people...
Maybe it's because I'm ill, but I can't see how fewer people pirating software create half a million jobs...
If 10% of the people who pirated photoshop bought it instead, Abobe would create loads more jobs, not just earn more profit?
Some people who aren't producing software because they're scard of piracy would decide it's OK to make it?
The CD printing factory and goods delivery industries will see a large boom?
As people are spending more money on software they decide they will order their own bespoke software instead of buying off-the-shelf packages?
It's not immediately obvious to me how this would create jobs within the software industry, maybe in tech support and other areas.
The CS assignments I was given in University were never 'very' simple. The first assignment in JAVA was to simulate an x team football league, each team playing every other twice and randomly determining match scores, printing match results and final league table. The C and VB assignments were of similar complexity. It's very implausible that two people could write very similar programs, in face, exponentially more unlikely with each additional line of code.
In relation to collaboration as cheating, as a teacher teaching CS at A-level (16-18 year-olds), I would absolutely love to do a big real collaborative project: break the students down into teams, assign roles, distribute modules, whatever, but it's not a good idea for several reasons:
1. Assigning roles. How do you divide responsibility equally to be fair, motivate the weak and strong students, and ensure that a project will actually produce some results?
2. Marking: how do you really know who did what? Has a weak student just rode on the backs of others? They might cover for him, they might not. There's no way to tell, and examiners don't like that.
3. Different ability and demotivation: if you're working with someone who can't write code and is destined to fail, how would you feel about your project? Yes your audio module might be perfect, but if you had nothing functional to plug it into you'd still be unhappy.
There's more of course, but the idea of teaching students how to program (and at the same time how to manage a project) almost forces them to work individually. The best I can do is teach them how to write efficient, maintainable code and hope that they end up working with others who can do the same.
I remember quite clearly encountering this message when I killed a process to see what it did. I got the interesting "windows will restart in 0:59..." message but quickly discovered that if you set the windows clock back, you ended up with more time, and could still use the computer with no problems.
So it was kind of a stupid error really.
What I think is strange is that 30-50% of epopel are using thei motherboards on-board sound to listen to stuff. You spend hundreds on a GPU, hundereds on a GPS, and have shitty sound? Sounds silly to me.
For a four-seater it is a big aircraft, measuring twelve metres (39 feet) long, seven metres high by five wide. It has never attained an altitude of more than seven feet.
If you look at the picture of said helicopter, something is amiss: seven metres high? The guy standing next to it is as tall as it. Is Nigeria a land of giants, of does sombody need to fix their metric conversion?
"But we've never had a single game make or break any of our platforms. That's not how we built 100 million sales of [the] PlayStation 2"
GTA3 was the saviour of the PS2, anyone with hardware sales figures and calander can show you that.
You seem to be confusing "FUD" with "Reality". HEre's an i nteresting piece of information for you: many IT teachers in high schools aren't technical wizards; a huge number of IT teachers don't have any network, hardware, programming, etc. experience and just teach the required curriculum (which incidentally includes the use of web queries in the KS3 national strategy. Not required, but many teachers don't have the time to redevelop a 7 week scheme of work just for the sake of it).
Then there are the implications for other staff, especially those who haven't been using computers all that much, they especially don't want to learn new stuff just to be able to teach for their last 5, 10 whatever years.
And I think that "If it's anthing like my old college" is a ridiculous statement; 11 year old kids you've been force-fed MS Office throughout promary school? It's lovely to show them something different, but it takes time.
You're obviously a big OSS fan, but the reality of the situation is that MS Office is familiar to most people who use PCs for generic purpose applications, has been developed for many years and is now actually a nice product (though it still has many strange design and function "features"), whereas OpenOffice is... free. That's pretty much the sole advantage of it in most peoples eyes. We gave the kids install packages on CDs, some of them said it was OK, but took a while to figure out, some of them said they didn't like it, and a few of them, those taking the subject at A-level, downright hated it. Nobody came back and said they loved it, why would they? It's an office package, it has no features massively better than MS office.
I teach IT is a high school in England and our IT manager recently decided to forego the £8,000 per year MS Office site license and go with open office. Now I'm certainly an advocate of open source software, but let me bring a few realities home to you:
Open Office is still not entirely stable. In terms of word processingand DTP it seems to be fine, but some of the spreadsheet functions that the kids need to use in projects (like webquery) make it crash. In fact, it crashed when the whole staff were being demonstrated it when the idea came up...
The Database software is no good for teaching; A-level and GCSE projects require the use of Macros, and teh database software does not have these. This means we have had to buy a 100 user license to MS office just so these kids can do their coursework. The alternatives of using Java and the like are unrealistic.
For most people it is a big step: many have used nothing but office, and that means they'll be confused come September when new programs are thrown at them; we're going to have to take some time out to familiarise the kids (and staff) with some of the features and quirks. We also have a huge number of books on spreadsheet and database use that would be defunct, and hundreds of teaching resources that we need to redevelop in our own time.
The reality of it is that making a switch to open office can be something of a nightmare, and I imagine that many organisations won't bother. The savings would take a good while to manifest themselves after the initial confusion/retraining/whatever. We were told last year that come this year there would eb no MS Office, Open Office was on the network and we should use it to keep familiar with it, but of cours nobody wanted to do that so now they're all doubly screwed.
I work as an IT teacher in a UK school.
My school, like a great many in the UK, has an RM network (http://www.rm.com/), if you've never come accross it, it basically seems to be an amalgamation of things that don't quite work properly held toegther by thousands of patches and bug fixes to create a truly crap network. Also, you can't open any of the server hardware, as it's all leased, and the only proper control you have is though all RM's proprietary software.
It is our network manager's job to hold all that crap together without anything major going wrong too often. It is pretty much impossible to overhaul large sections of the network due to very tight budgets, so you live with what you've got, only replacing things when they're truly broken.
If you think you're a good sysadmin, try working with a system that you don't have time to fix (or even the PERMISSION to fix properly for an RM network) or money to replace, and that up to one thousand small children are actively trying to fuck up wherever possible.
As I recall, there was a SNES game named EVO that featured the exact same evolutionary concept. Though I decided not to evolve past the 'massive deadly dinosaur' stage and was eventually made extinct by superiour beings just as I realised it was time to move on.
Hey wait, that reminds me of...
So you're discriminating against white males by not allowing them to discuss discrimination because they're not discriminated against? But then, because you've discriminate against them, they can discuss it, but then you haven't discriminated against them because you've....
My neighbour has a swimming pool which he says my friends or I can use any time we like (unless there's an emergency), but we're decided to put our money together and build our own swimming pool, which will be slightly better than his. For some reason he accused us of showing off when we told everyone about this, we just thought that it was best to have our own in case we're not always friends.
Slashdot Mirror
I teach Computer Science/programmin to 11-18-year-olds in the UK. It's very easy for any professional or academic to say that everyone should learn C, python, or whatever else. The questions those people should ask themselves is have you actually had to teach those things at that level, and are you aware of all the constraints that the average school pupil, teacher, or network has? I inherited my first class (16-17 year-olds) who had been learning VB6 for a year and had to stuck with it, I moved the next year group to VB.NET and it worked well. VB.NET, if taught correctly can teach the logic, syntax, and programming concepts needed to start a new project in a new language. Importantly, the majority of pupils from 13+ are able to understand the meaning behind virtually all the code they are writing. I could not say the same thing about teaching C. The post from the teacher in question is clear: we are not teaching a specific language, whatever that may be, we are teaching the concepts of programming, from procedures, and conditions to data structures and object orientation, in order to solve problems. It's like arguing that teaching pupils the recorder is stupid because they should all learn the cello; if they learn to read and compose music, they can pick up whatever they really want to do later.
There's nothing wrong with using automated marking where it's actually saving time, as long as the results are used to further learning. The simple idea (employed by the Khan academy and others) is to get students/pupils to practise at home, a system tracks what they can do and what they struggle with, and the teacher-pupil/student-professor contact time is used to address any issues. Grading simple, repetitive tasks is a waste of time if it can be automated; it's the feedback that matters. I assume that this paper marking thing is able to generate reasons for the grades it gives, and some of that is probably also a little useful.
I assume this special Apple 'Huge Quarter' is essentially the same as any other quarter, but they've polished it up a little and will sell it to you for fifty cents. Or maybe it's mistyped and Tim Cook has a very spacious cabin on the USS Apple...
This is one of those wonderful headline that will read as utterly bizzare nonsense to most of the world.
I'm a high-school ICT/Computing teaching in the UK (and have been directly involved with some of the discussion with the Royal Society, Prof. Steve Furber and others) and I've been teaching programming and some CS along side ICT for years now. Even the lowest ability kids can program and enjoy doing it. Nobody's asking 11 year olds to write C++, at that level it's Scratch, Alice and other visual languages that provide quick rewards for the use of a little logic. Every single one of they enjoys learning how to make games. SOme for the result, some for the challenge, but there's not a single one I can think of that resents it. Programming starts to get harder when kids have to write more code (flash/actionscript is a decent next step here) or actually do all the work themselves (VB, Python, C# etc.), and some won't get it, but everyone should have the opportunity to see what's possible The point of this move IS that everyone should be given a taster of what's possible; nobody's mind is going to be expanded by making PowerPoints, but some of the kids I introduced programming to seven years ago are now off to study CS at Oxford and Cambridge, hopefully to be the next generation of innovators. Equally, the jobs market is going to keep shifting in its requirement for technical experience: more advanced software, robotics, etc. means unskilled jobs disappear, and highly-skilled tech jobs replace them.
I'm not sure of the definition of doing 'badly' here when the average unemployment rate was 3.8% and the CS unemployment rate was 5.1%. Is just over one percent more graduates not having a job 'performing badly?'
If you actually check the data that the article references, you'll also find that the figures included a very broad range of CS degrees, including any joint degree that includes CS. Also from the article:
It’s not all bad news, 81.5% of computer science graduates were in full time employment four years on from their degree, compared to just 73.2% of all graduates. For maths graduates the figure is 73.1% and for physical science graduates it is just 66.0% – though a whopping 19.8% of them are in full-time education.
As somebody who's currently teaming Computing/Computer Science in the UK to 11-18 year-olds this type of scaremongering is not helpful.
Simple enough: the outside edge of the universe is the point when galaxies stop being there.
You could refer to the 'outside' edge of a town in a similar way; it doesn't mean there's an actual edge, just a point after which you're not really interested.
...is build several, maybe up to one hundred closed structures (to protect the inhabitants from the harsh outdoor climate) and have small communities of around one hundred people in each one, with one individual (some sort of overseer) the whole area. They could test different social situations for each of the groups in large experiments, which go on for several years before the door to the community is opened. Kind of like a 'vault' for people...
...But this stalemate can't last forever. One side has to win. Either piracy or anti-piracy will win.
Just like all other crime! I'm looking forward to the day when the police finally defeat all the drug dealers/murderers/thieves!
Maybe it's because I'm ill, but I can't see how fewer people pirating software create half a million jobs... If 10% of the people who pirated photoshop bought it instead, Abobe would create loads more jobs, not just earn more profit? Some people who aren't producing software because they're scard of piracy would decide it's OK to make it? The CD printing factory and goods delivery industries will see a large boom? As people are spending more money on software they decide they will order their own bespoke software instead of buying off-the-shelf packages? It's not immediately obvious to me how this would create jobs within the software industry, maybe in tech support and other areas.
Adobe discontinue all their software suites for the mac and change their updaters to uninstall everything remotely and everyone is very sad.
The CS assignments I was given in University were never 'very' simple. The first assignment in JAVA was to simulate an x team football league, each team playing every other twice and randomly determining match scores, printing match results and final league table. The C and VB assignments were of similar complexity. It's very implausible that two people could write very similar programs, in face, exponentially more unlikely with each additional line of code. In relation to collaboration as cheating, as a teacher teaching CS at A-level (16-18 year-olds), I would absolutely love to do a big real collaborative project: break the students down into teams, assign roles, distribute modules, whatever, but it's not a good idea for several reasons: 1. Assigning roles. How do you divide responsibility equally to be fair, motivate the weak and strong students, and ensure that a project will actually produce some results? 2. Marking: how do you really know who did what? Has a weak student just rode on the backs of others? They might cover for him, they might not. There's no way to tell, and examiners don't like that. 3. Different ability and demotivation: if you're working with someone who can't write code and is destined to fail, how would you feel about your project? Yes your audio module might be perfect, but if you had nothing functional to plug it into you'd still be unhappy. There's more of course, but the idea of teaching students how to program (and at the same time how to manage a project) almost forces them to work individually. The best I can do is teach them how to write efficient, maintainable code and hope that they end up working with others who can do the same.
The LCARS operating system has been in decline for years now.
I remember quite clearly encountering this message when I killed a process to see what it did. I got the interesting "windows will restart in 0:59..." message but quickly discovered that if you set the windows clock back, you ended up with more time, and could still use the computer with no problems. So it was kind of a stupid error really.
My desktop background has pretty much ALWAYS been a black background. I suggest changing it to a picture of Balmer with a mean look on his face.
What I think is strange is that 30-50% of epopel are using thei motherboards on-board sound to listen to stuff. You spend hundreds on a GPU, hundereds on a GPS, and have shitty sound? Sounds silly to me.
...but I'm not a fucking WIZARD either. Which of the two is more disturbing to pretend to be anyway?
"But we've never had a single game make or break any of our platforms. That's not how we built 100 million sales of [the] PlayStation 2" GTA3 was the saviour of the PS2, anyone with hardware sales figures and calander can show you that.
You seem to be confusing "FUD" with "Reality". HEre's an i nteresting piece of information for you: many IT teachers in high schools aren't technical wizards; a huge number of IT teachers don't have any network, hardware, programming, etc. experience and just teach the required curriculum (which incidentally includes the use of web queries in the KS3 national strategy. Not required, but many teachers don't have the time to redevelop a 7 week scheme of work just for the sake of it). Then there are the implications for other staff, especially those who haven't been using computers all that much, they especially don't want to learn new stuff just to be able to teach for their last 5, 10 whatever years. And I think that "If it's anthing like my old college" is a ridiculous statement; 11 year old kids you've been force-fed MS Office throughout promary school? It's lovely to show them something different, but it takes time. You're obviously a big OSS fan, but the reality of the situation is that MS Office is familiar to most people who use PCs for generic purpose applications, has been developed for many years and is now actually a nice product (though it still has many strange design and function "features"), whereas OpenOffice is... free. That's pretty much the sole advantage of it in most peoples eyes. We gave the kids install packages on CDs, some of them said it was OK, but took a while to figure out, some of them said they didn't like it, and a few of them, those taking the subject at A-level, downright hated it. Nobody came back and said they loved it, why would they? It's an office package, it has no features massively better than MS office.
I teach IT is a high school in England and our IT manager recently decided to forego the £8,000 per year MS Office site license and go with open office. Now I'm certainly an advocate of open source software, but let me bring a few realities home to you:
Open Office is still not entirely stable. In terms of word processingand DTP it seems to be fine, but some of the spreadsheet functions that the kids need to use in projects (like webquery) make it crash. In fact, it crashed when the whole staff were being demonstrated it when the idea came up...
The Database software is no good for teaching; A-level and GCSE projects require the use of Macros, and teh database software does not have these. This means we have had to buy a 100 user license to MS office just so these kids can do their coursework. The alternatives of using Java and the like are unrealistic.
For most people it is a big step: many have used nothing but office, and that means they'll be confused come September when new programs are thrown at them; we're going to have to take some time out to familiarise the kids (and staff) with some of the features and quirks. We also have a huge number of books on spreadsheet and database use that would be defunct, and hundreds of teaching resources that we need to redevelop in our own time.
The reality of it is that making a switch to open office can be something of a nightmare, and I imagine that many organisations won't bother. The savings would take a good while to manifest themselves after the initial confusion/retraining/whatever. We were told last year that come this year there would eb no MS Office, Open Office was on the network and we should use it to keep familiar with it, but of cours nobody wanted to do that so now they're all doubly screwed.
I work as an IT teacher in a UK school. My school, like a great many in the UK, has an RM network (http://www.rm.com/), if you've never come accross it, it basically seems to be an amalgamation of things that don't quite work properly held toegther by thousands of patches and bug fixes to create a truly crap network. Also, you can't open any of the server hardware, as it's all leased, and the only proper control you have is though all RM's proprietary software. It is our network manager's job to hold all that crap together without anything major going wrong too often. It is pretty much impossible to overhaul large sections of the network due to very tight budgets, so you live with what you've got, only replacing things when they're truly broken. If you think you're a good sysadmin, try working with a system that you don't have time to fix (or even the PERMISSION to fix properly for an RM network) or money to replace, and that up to one thousand small children are actively trying to fuck up wherever possible.
As I recall, there was a SNES game named EVO that featured the exact same evolutionary concept. Though I decided not to evolve past the 'massive deadly dinosaur' stage and was eventually made extinct by superiour beings just as I realised it was time to move on. Hey wait, that reminds me of...
So you're discriminating against white males by not allowing them to discuss discrimination because they're not discriminated against? But then, because you've discriminate against them, they can discuss it, but then you haven't discriminated against them because you've....
My neighbour has a swimming pool which he says my friends or I can use any time we like (unless there's an emergency), but we're decided to put our money together and build our own swimming pool, which will be slightly better than his. For some reason he accused us of showing off when we told everyone about this, we just thought that it was best to have our own in case we're not always friends.