6 ms·

How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

34 points by forrestbrazeal 11y ago

jwdunne 11y ago
Interesting article. I can touch type but I prefer pen and paper for to do lists, mind maps, exploring problems and note taking. It's always seemed more "effective" than using a computer or my phone - even crossing off a task feels better. I always assumed this was because I engage more areas of the brain. I'm excited to find the real reason so the research is now on my to-read list.
- forrestbrazeal 11y ago
  Definitely agreed. There's something about physically engaging with the note-taking space that can't be replicated at a layer of abstraction, through peripheral devices.
- yodsanklai 11y ago
  > I always assumed this was because I engage more areas of the brain Or could it be just because it's still hard to draw things and write formulas using a computer.
  - jwdunne 11y ago
    In fairness, in my own notes, formulas are rare. The only thing close to drawing in my notes is a spider diagram and MindNode is probably a lot easier and friendlier than pen and paper for that. I can probably cover my ground in Photoshop than I can on paper too. Pen and paper just seems to make things 'sink in'. Feels a bit different to being hindered by the tool of choice!
- randycupertino 11y ago
  I just went back to school for some professional certificate classes and none of the younger students use a pen and paper. I certainly felt like "the old dude" behind the times taking notes with pen and paper. I got a 4.0 though, so it was working. Also some of the young bucks were also always asking me for copies of my notes, so I took it as a compliment!
meshko 11y ago
This article just made me feel like i am 70. Thanks. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
- strictnein 11y ago
  Same. Mid 30s, no one used laptops to take notes when I was in college. Somehow we all survived.
  - sevensor 11y ago
    Also mid 30s, just wrapped up an engineering Ph.D at a major state research university. It wasn't CS, but still quite technical. Never once did I see classmates use laptops for taking notes. Maybe it was just my department, but we were pen and paper all the way. I'm a bit astonished that taking notes on a laptop is even a thing. It seems incredibly distracting and ineffective. How does one draw diagrams or write equations?
forrestbrazeal 11y ago
I'd be interested also to know what people think about taking notes on a tablet with a stylus. I've never done this, and I think it could provide some of the benefits of taking notes on paper, but not all. For example, turning physical pages and visualizing data in concrete locations would still be more helpful for me, since I'm a spatial learner.
- zyxley 11y ago
  I've done this for a variety of subjects, and I rather like it... but it depends on having a very good tablet and a very good stylus (e.g. iPad Pro, Surface Pro, or so on). For me there were two key points: it makes it very easy to drop in photos of slides or diagrams, and it makes it very easy to rearrange page contents after doing a first pass of ad-hoc notes.
radicality 11y ago
Pretty much everyone in my university took notes on paper in CS classes. Most of it was just math which is much easier to note down with pen and paper (I tried tablets with a stylus but still prefer pen+paper).
- kaybe 11y ago
  The best version I've seen for image-heavy lectures is the lecturer writing with his pad on half-prepared slides, which have also been given to the students for print-out. It combines the advantages from pure slides with pure blackboard writing: - The student has enough time to think and not just write (has often been a problem when the professor is writing very fast and doing complicated stuff). - The student still gets to 'touch' the material and have their own take on it, and writes the critical points and diagrams themselves. - There is no fear of missing something in the hand-written notes when as when deciding between writing and thinking/try to figure out which parts to note down.
  - randycupertino 11y ago
    ... and then also record the lecture in case you missed anything else!
inanutshellus 11y ago
Misleading title - He took class notes using a notebook instead of a laptop. I dared to hope to find some absurd story about turning in his CS homework in hand-written C++...
- mamon 11y ago
  That was what I was doing for the whole first semester of my CS studies: we learned basics of C++ by writing code on paper or on the board. It was very basic stuff, aimed at people who never programmed before, so we learned about loops and other control structures cin/cout streams etc. Probably that's why my CS department stuff thought it would be a waste to let us use real computers in the university's labs :)
- Retr0spectrum 11y ago
  I'm doing an Electronics A Level, and we have to hand write code in a fictional assembly dialect.
  - jon-wood 11y ago
    Good to see they haven't updated the curriculum since I did it fifteen years ago!
- Pinckney 11y ago
  As a TA, I've actually seen students do this in numerical analysis.
- lfowles 11y ago
  That's how tests were in Data Structures class (but C# and the method boilerplate printed, so just fill in the blank)
DawkinsGawd 11y ago
Disappointed. I thought the article was going to focus on why a computer isn't even necessary for a computer science degree. In other words - how a computer science degree is mostly just a degree in mathematics, and a lot of the coding that you do (algorithm work, obviously not a software engineering or programming intensive course) should be done with pencil. I have been seeing a lot of articles claiming that a barrier to CS curriculum in high school is that they don't have the technological capabilities to support such curriculum. Nonsense. If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer. Pencil and paper only.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- vvanders 11y ago
  Never? That sounds like a sure way to make sure any students who took that class would be very disengaged.
  - dsp1234 11y ago
    I did my first programming with pencil and paper, and I'm still engaged 30+ years later
    - vvanders 11y ago
      We're talking about high school here though. Seems to me it would be like running a chemistry class without doing any lab work.
      - rondsquare 11y ago
        Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but that's how chemistry is taught in 3rd world countries. Labs are a luxury :)
        lfowles 11y ago
jh3 11y ago
Taking notes on a computer by itself never really helped me learn. I would always write down on paper everything I typed on a computer during class. Doing this would help solidify the lesson in my mind.
cubano 11y ago
I can't help but think...I got my CP/CS degree with pencil and paper, and the only computer I used was a timeshared VAX and PDP11 at the university lab, so I'm not really sure what the big deal is here. Sure I wrote some code on those systems, but 90% of my work was done with pencil, papar, and a HP11c calculator.
al2o3cr 11y ago
Better title: "How I decided that a practice that works better for me is clearly superior to others (and why I'm writing a blog to be smug about it)"
- randycupertino 11y ago
  That could be the title for almost every blog post ever, though.
sremani 11y ago
There are lot of people coming to same conclusion, learning low-tech is probably best way of doing learning. Because Computers themselves have become such a distraction, social media or tech journalism etc. There is a story in the book "Deep Work", where a finance dude Mastered programming (javascript,I would guess), with a textbook and flashcards. If this does not change any thing, it should give all us a minute to think, the mind-numbing was technology is being pushed with a claim for improving education, but nothing empirical to back it up.
foiejapofijw 11y ago
Misleading title and limited content aside, one sentence stood out to me: "This wasn’t such a big deal when I was actually doing computer programming homework, since people who can code at typing speed are pretty rare." How does everyone else feel about the "rareness"?
- unit91 11y ago
  If by "people" he means "undergraduate students" then yes, they're probably pretty rare. On the other hand, if he means "an average programmer with 5+ years experience", probably not rare at all. Given the scope of the article, I'd assume he means the former.
- acbabis 11y ago
  Planning your code is part of coding. To truly "code at typing speed", you would have to do no prep-work or research and type your program beginning to end with no bugs (see: http://www.hackertyper.com/ http://www.hackertyper.com/). I'd say that's pretty rare.
innertracks 11y ago
Here's a great resource for taking handwritten note taking to the next level with doodles/sketchnotes. Sketchnoting is pretty fun and does seem to help with learning. http://sachachua.com/blog/book-accelerate-your-learning-with-sketchnotes/ http://sachachua.com/blog/book-accelerate-your-learning-with...
LyndsySimon 11y ago
I took up penmanship as a hobby about a year ago, and now carry fountain pens and write down most everything I would have previously typed. It's actually a well-known thing in the fountain pen community that writing notes instead of typing them aides in comprehension.
- randycupertino 11y ago
  That is awesome. I love that there is a fountain pen community!
  - LyndsySimon 11y ago
    There are thousands of us. Check out /r/fountainpens. There's even an IRC channel listed in the sidebar. There are 25 of us online right now, and have been as many as 120 or so in the past. Fountain pens are more popular among IRC users than supervisord, based on channel participation :)
make3 11y ago
I'm in my last year in CS in a North American university and most people take pen and paper notes when they do take notes, and mostly only use their laptops to read previous slides again in presentations/ waste time on random internet bs. This article is making a big deal out of nothing out of the ordinary
tyomero 11y ago
Hahahaha, this article is funny. This explains why migrants from "the 3rd world" can take away jobs in "developed" countries ... we took notes with a pen... not by choice but because most of us could not afford a computer. How ironic.

Interesting article. I can touch type but I prefer pen and paper for to do lists, mind maps, exploring problems and note taking. It's always seemed more "effective" than using a computer or my phone - even crossing off a task feels better. I always assumed this was because I engage more areas of the brain. I'm excited to find the real reason so the research is now on my to-read list.

forrestbrazeal 11y ago
Definitely agreed. There's something about physically engaging with the note-taking space that can't be replicated at a layer of abstraction, through peripheral devices.
yodsanklai 11y ago
> I always assumed this was because I engage more areas of the brain Or could it be just because it's still hard to draw things and write formulas using a computer.
- jwdunne 11y ago
  In fairness, in my own notes, formulas are rare. The only thing close to drawing in my notes is a spider diagram and MindNode is probably a lot easier and friendlier than pen and paper for that. I can probably cover my ground in Photoshop than I can on paper too. Pen and paper just seems to make things 'sink in'. Feels a bit different to being hindered by the tool of choice!
randycupertino 11y ago
I just went back to school for some professional certificate classes and none of the younger students use a pen and paper. I certainly felt like "the old dude" behind the times taking notes with pen and paper. I got a 4.0 though, so it was working. Also some of the young bucks were also always asking me for copies of my notes, so I took it as a compliment!

meshko 11y ago

This article just made me feel like i am 70. Thanks. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

strictnein 11y ago
Same. Mid 30s, no one used laptops to take notes when I was in college. Somehow we all survived.
- sevensor 11y ago
  Also mid 30s, just wrapped up an engineering Ph.D at a major state research university. It wasn't CS, but still quite technical. Never once did I see classmates use laptops for taking notes. Maybe it was just my department, but we were pen and paper all the way. I'm a bit astonished that taking notes on a laptop is even a thing. It seems incredibly distracting and ineffective. How does one draw diagrams or write equations?

forrestbrazeal 11y ago

I'd be interested also to know what people think about taking notes on a tablet with a stylus. I've never done this, and I think it could provide some of the benefits of taking notes on paper, but not all. For example, turning physical pages and visualizing data in concrete locations would still be more helpful for me, since I'm a spatial learner.

zyxley 11y ago
I've done this for a variety of subjects, and I rather like it... but it depends on having a very good tablet and a very good stylus (e.g. iPad Pro, Surface Pro, or so on). For me there were two key points: it makes it very easy to drop in photos of slides or diagrams, and it makes it very easy to rearrange page contents after doing a first pass of ad-hoc notes.

radicality 11y ago

Pretty much everyone in my university took notes on paper in CS classes. Most of it was just math which is much easier to note down with pen and paper (I tried tablets with a stylus but still prefer pen+paper).

kaybe 11y ago
The best version I've seen for image-heavy lectures is the lecturer writing with his pad on half-prepared slides, which have also been given to the students for print-out. It combines the advantages from pure slides with pure blackboard writing: - The student has enough time to think and not just write (has often been a problem when the professor is writing very fast and doing complicated stuff). - The student still gets to 'touch' the material and have their own take on it, and writes the critical points and diagrams themselves. - There is no fear of missing something in the hand-written notes when as when deciding between writing and thinking/try to figure out which parts to note down.
- randycupertino 11y ago
  ... and then also record the lecture in case you missed anything else!

inanutshellus 11y ago

Misleading title - He took class notes using a notebook instead of a laptop. I dared to hope to find some absurd story about turning in his CS homework in hand-written C++...

mamon 11y ago
That was what I was doing for the whole first semester of my CS studies: we learned basics of C++ by writing code on paper or on the board. It was very basic stuff, aimed at people who never programmed before, so we learned about loops and other control structures cin/cout streams etc. Probably that's why my CS department stuff thought it would be a waste to let us use real computers in the university's labs :)
Retr0spectrum 11y ago
I'm doing an Electronics A Level, and we have to hand write code in a fictional assembly dialect.
- jon-wood 11y ago
  Good to see they haven't updated the curriculum since I did it fifteen years ago!
Pinckney 11y ago
As a TA, I've actually seen students do this in numerical analysis.
lfowles 11y ago
That's how tests were in Data Structures class (but C# and the method boilerplate printed, so just fill in the blank)

DawkinsGawd 11y ago

Disappointed. I thought the article was going to focus on why a computer isn't even necessary for a computer science degree. In other words - how a computer science degree is mostly just a degree in mathematics, and a lot of the coding that you do (algorithm work, obviously not a software engineering or programming intensive course) should be done with pencil. I have been seeing a lot of articles claiming that a barrier to CS curriculum in high school is that they don't have the technological capabilities to support such curriculum. Nonsense. If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer. Pencil and paper only.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vvanders 11y ago
Never? That sounds like a sure way to make sure any students who took that class would be very disengaged.
- dsp1234 11y ago
  I did my first programming with pencil and paper, and I'm still engaged 30+ years later
  - vvanders 11y ago
    We're talking about high school here though. Seems to me it would be like running a chemistry class without doing any lab work.
    - rondsquare 11y ago
      Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but that's how chemistry is taught in 3rd world countries. Labs are a luxury :)
      - lfowles 11y ago

jh3 11y ago

Taking notes on a computer by itself never really helped me learn. I would always write down on paper everything I typed on a computer during class. Doing this would help solidify the lesson in my mind.

cubano 11y ago

I can't help but think...I got my CP/CS degree with pencil and paper, and the only computer I used was a timeshared VAX and PDP11 at the university lab, so I'm not really sure what the big deal is here. Sure I wrote some code on those systems, but 90% of my work was done with pencil, papar, and a HP11c calculator.

al2o3cr 11y ago

Better title: "How I decided that a practice that works better for me is clearly superior to others (and why I'm writing a blog to be smug about it)"

randycupertino 11y ago
That could be the title for almost every blog post ever, though.

sremani 11y ago

There are lot of people coming to same conclusion, learning low-tech is probably best way of doing learning. Because Computers themselves have become such a distraction, social media or tech journalism etc. There is a story in the book "Deep Work", where a finance dude Mastered programming (javascript,I would guess), with a textbook and flashcards. If this does not change any thing, it should give all us a minute to think, the mind-numbing was technology is being pushed with a claim for improving education, but nothing empirical to back it up.

foiejapofijw 11y ago

Misleading title and limited content aside, one sentence stood out to me: "This wasn’t such a big deal when I was actually doing computer programming homework, since people who can code at typing speed are pretty rare." How does everyone else feel about the "rareness"?

unit91 11y ago
If by "people" he means "undergraduate students" then yes, they're probably pretty rare. On the other hand, if he means "an average programmer with 5+ years experience", probably not rare at all. Given the scope of the article, I'd assume he means the former.
acbabis 11y ago
Planning your code is part of coding. To truly "code at typing speed", you would have to do no prep-work or research and type your program beginning to end with no bugs (see: http://www.hackertyper.com/ http://www.hackertyper.com/). I'd say that's pretty rare.

innertracks 11y ago

Here's a great resource for taking handwritten note taking to the next level with doodles/sketchnotes. Sketchnoting is pretty fun and does seem to help with learning. http://sachachua.com/blog/book-accelerate-your-learning-with-sketchnotes/ http://sachachua.com/blog/book-accelerate-your-learning-with...

LyndsySimon 11y ago

I took up penmanship as a hobby about a year ago, and now carry fountain pens and write down most everything I would have previously typed. It's actually a well-known thing in the fountain pen community that writing notes instead of typing them aides in comprehension.

randycupertino 11y ago
That is awesome. I love that there is a fountain pen community!
- LyndsySimon 11y ago
  There are thousands of us. Check out /r/fountainpens. There's even an IRC channel listed in the sidebar. There are 25 of us online right now, and have been as many as 120 or so in the past. Fountain pens are more popular among IRC users than supervisord, based on channel participation :)

make3 11y ago

I'm in my last year in CS in a North American university and most people take pen and paper notes when they do take notes, and mostly only use their laptops to read previous slides again in presentations/ waste time on random internet bs. This article is making a big deal out of nothing out of the ordinary

tyomero 11y ago

Hahahaha, this article is funny. This explains why migrants from "the 3rd world" can take away jobs in "developed" countries ... we took notes with a pen... not by choice but because most of us could not afford a computer. How ironic.