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Having worked with many of my fellow graduate students to try to teach CS concepts to incoming students without any CS background my conclusion here is that we

by hyperion2010 10y ago

Having worked with many of my fellow graduate students to try to teach CS concepts to incoming students without any CS background my conclusion here is that we simply don't know how to teach computer science. My suspicion is that many people who learn CS usually do it inspite of attempts to teach them, not because of instruction. Think about how long it took humans to figure out how to teach reading to _everyone_. We had to break the old whole reading method and switch over to phonics, and that was decades after we had the hard scientific evidence that phonics was the missing perspective needed to get that last percentage of students to read. We are probably decades away from understanding how to teach CS to everyone, let alone getting those techniques implemented.

GregBuchholz 10y ago
>We had to break the old whole reading method and switch over to phonics, and that was decades after we had the hard scientific evidence that phonics was the missing perspective needed to get that last percentage of students to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Spread_of_the_alphabet_and_its_social_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Spread_of_...
- taeric 10y ago
  I'm not clear on what the link is supposed to be getting me. Phonetics and Phoenician are two different things. Right?
  - jdmichal 10y ago
    I agree that the post is severely underspecified. I think the point is the last paragraph of the linked section: > Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations which came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script. Its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of writing systems only being learned and employed by members of the royal and religious hierarchies of society, who used writing as an instrument of power to control access to information by the larger population.[11] The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms such as Assyria, Babylonia and Adiabene would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the Common Era. That is, Phoenician was the first wide-spread phonetic script. That, in turn, had major effects on civilizations as it was simple enough for commoners to learn. That being the rather tenuous link back to the original idea of teaching reading based on phonetics. Of course, there is a bit of a gap here, in that English phonetics are notoriously unstandardized across the lexicon.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      > Phoenician was the first wide-spread phonetic script. That, in turn, had major effects on civilizations as it was simple enough for commoners to learn. The cuneiform of the time was, at heart, a syllabic script; while a phonetic script is arguably simpler, it's not much simpler. The real problem with cuneiform is not that it was syllabic instead of alphabetic, it's that you had plenty of options other than syllabic representation, as well. (And written Egyptian, the parent system of the Phoenician alphabet, was already genuinely phonetic! It didn't have vowels, but neither did the Phoenician script.) All that said, that sort of shortcut-encrustation seems to develop naturally within all writing systems. If I send someone "have a good day" and get back "u 2", that's exactly the kind of shortcut that we blast ancient writing systems for using. But that shortcut, in modern English, actually represents a very high literacy rate, and use of the writing system by someone who can't be bothered to observe its formal conventions. Under low-literacy conditions, educated people tend to scrupulously observe whatever weird conventions their writing system might have. That's how you know they're educated.
      - jdmichal 10y ago
        I'm assuming by Egyptian you mean Hieroglyphics. (They also used Hieratic and later Demotic.) Hieroglyphics are a mixed phonetic-logographic system. Even on the phonetic side, there are many ways to spell the same set of consonants, thanks to the existence of digraphs and trigraphs and repetition. The vowels probably differed, but those aren't written. The spelling for a particular word was usually fixed, though. Wikipedia has an excellent example using nfr in its determinatives section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determinatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determina... So, Hieroglyphics had phonetic components, but it was far from being a phonetic abjad like Phoenician. (An abjad is an alphabet without vowel markers.)
        thaumasiotes 10y ago
        Hieroglyphics are a mixed phonetic-logographic system in the same way that English is a mixed phonetic-logographic system, where the second person pronoun can be represented by "you" or by the logograph u. How much is that hurting our literacy rate?
  - GregBuchholz 10y ago
    Sorry. I just found it amusing, that here we are, using the English alphabet (a descendant of the original Phoenician alphabet) talking as if phonetics as a reading aid is a new phenomena. But the whole reason the Phoenician alphabet became so popular 3200 years ago was it's use of symbols representing spoken sounds.
    - 13of40 10y ago
      Maybe the point is that deemphasized the phonics technique for 3000 years and focused more on lessons like this: https://books.google.com/books?id=E-diAAAAcAAJ&dq=reading&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q=reading&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=E-diAAAAcAAJ&dq=reading&pg...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
projektir 10y ago
> Having worked with many of my fellow graduate students to try to teach CS concepts to incoming students without any CS background my conclusion here is that we simply don't know how to teach computer science. My suspicion is that many people who learn CS usually do it inspite of attempts to teach them, not because of instruction. I have this assumption about almost all organized learning at this time. I think that's also why things like IQ/g/etc. look so important - they make the learning "in spite of" more tractable, because you have enough of a buffer to deal with even really bad information at a very fast pace, and because high IQ students will make one's education methods look good even if they're terrible.
- caseymarquis 10y ago
  The ironic conclusion is that the most selective institutions could offer the worst environment and still boast about high levels of post-institutional success.
  - projektir 10y ago
    Having gone to a relatively selective institution, that was definitely my impression of the place...
jaykru 10y ago
This analogy fails when you consider Chinese and similarly encoded written systems. Sure, there are methods employed that use radicals in order to provide phonetic "hints," but written Chinese is predominantly acquired through rote memorization. Many countries that use written Chinese today have comparable literacy rates to countries that use syllabic and phonetic systems. What have they done right that took phonics for us to do?
- hyperion2010 10y ago
  I think the difference here is that reading is considered to be so important that people don't just stop if a child doesn't learn it. The child will end up spending an enormous amount of time studying something when another technique might allow them to learn it more quickly. There is no similar equivalent for learning how to program. No one is going to prevent a student from graduating college until they figure out how to read and write a computer program, and you sure as hell can't prevent them from going out to play.
YZF 10y ago
The biggest problem with teaching reading is that not everyone is ready or interested in learning how to read at the same age. Studying why we can't force a random group of 7 year olds to learn how to read is missing the point. We homeschool. One of my daughters became a fluent reader very early. The other when she was a few years older. You can't force people or children to learn something they're not interested or aren't ready (for various reasons) to learn which unfortunately is basically what the educational system is built around. It's really less about methods which make a marginal difference. The problem with higher education is that we are still forcing people into those programs. If you want to make a good salary you take CS. Whether you have any interest or passion in that area is not relevant. Whatever your level of mathematical maturity is not relevant. You are of the right age and you want a successful career that's where you go. It's no wonder that teaching all those people CS is going to be difficult. It's still the same faulty approach to education. Everything can be taught and everyone can be taught and if it doesn't work we just need to find a better way of force feeding them. Compounding that even further is that teaching is difficult under the best of circumstances. In higher education it's often researchers who are asked to teach (or students) and while they may be brilliant on an intellectual level it doesn't necessarily make them good teachers. EDIT: And a thought on the bi-modality ... I would expect to be able to see this sort of modality at the output of a CS program. I would expect modality amongst students who graduated with the same grades. I would be really surprised if students graduating with the same grades perform similarly in software development tasks. Not clear to me what a CS grade means and how they relate to any natural abilities to e.g. write computer programs.
abecedarius 10y ago
That "old whole reading method" seems to be a 20th-C. thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_education_in_the_United_States#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_education_in_the_Unite... preceded by phonics-ish learning.
uAren_tWong 10y ago
I have taught some, and the most successful technique I employed was much the same as what a compiler does with chunking packets of instructions for the assembler. It's fairly logical, actually very logical, inasmuch as it is to think that the human mind can process things in some discrete amount, and then move that data to the hindbrain and ready the visuo-spatial cortex for more. Repetition is key for this to happen, yet we don't really reiterate a lot (well, in my humble experience) of the things we learn as CS students, other than the bajillion attempts to code properly on our own. We do things maybe twice, three times, then we take some notes or move on to a different part of the subject. The brain needs a 'lot' of repetition to have something down like we do things that require muscle memory. So, how to make something that would, on its face, appear tedious into a feature set? Well, again, from my humble teaching experience, and to extend the muscle memory analogy: muscle confusion! Mix up the media used to teach, and be creative about it. Don't just copy paste a slideshow from a dataset that some UW prof has put together, and then add a video from a YouTube tut, and call that a multimedia presentation (no offense, I know teaching is fucking hard, I'm being ideal here). Instead, MAKE UP a cool little ditty about what constitutes a class declaration (punny, no?) and then couple that with a dance that entails the two dancers to be logical constructs like XOR and NOT and have a little memory register ho-down...lol. Ok, well like I said, muscle confusion, but with the various lobes of e mind being entertained and enervated, booooi (said to the voice of Flava-Flav). IF in doubt, simply go piece by piece, building larger chunks of data for he students to learn and reiterate over each new chunk aggregating the last until the entire set of concepts is learned well enough to be determined comprehensive.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
We don't know how to teach fuckall. We basically shove a bunch of crap and resources in students' faces, and we hope that they can manage to teach themselves anything of value. Once in a blue moon there's a teacher who truly knows how to get their students to learn well (I've had more than my fair share in my academic career, that's for sure, but even so it was a tiny minority), most "teaching" is basically just cargo culting and going through the motions to "cover the material". So of course we see a pattern of folks who don't have as much support for learning outside of school tend to be at a disadvantage except in rare cases. Most education is practically coincidental to the process, a matter of osmosis and expectations as much as anything else. And in truth if you take a recently minted college graduate off the line and do some truly in depth tests of the quality of their education you'll find it sorely lacking in almost all cases, no matter their GPA, alma matter, or major. Education is a bit like journalism. You find in journalism that whenever a story comes out in a subject you are intimately familiar with it's riddled with errors, inaccuracies, half-truths, and sometimes worse. Which makes you wonder about the rest (it's the same). In education you find that once you acquire a sound and thorough understanding of a topic you look at the way it's taught and see a lot of busy work, almost no concentration on the fundamentals, and a constant pattern of "keeping pace" even as most of the class gets left behind and typically only retains enough knowledge to pass the tests by sheer force of will (memorization, test taking techniques, and trial and error). For me the best STEM classes in college were always the ones where you had to apply your knowledge, but those classes were too rare and not as well attended as the mandatory classes. Unfortunately, a lot of institutional education in STEM fields suffers from several fundamental difficulties. For one there's is the common perspective that "it's supposed to be hard", and so curricula are tuned to weed out those who can't tough it through. For another, there's a tremendous focus on rote memorization, busy work, and trivia versus practical, applied, core knowledge. Real life is not like an episode of Jeopardy, the vast majority of the time you are better off with having a sound understanding of the fundamentals and the ability to look up or pick up any specifics or trivia as needed. This is true whether we're talking about CS, math, chemistry, physics, or what-have-you. Yet consistently the system is setup to reward the folks who are able and willing to suffer through most of that useless memorization and busywork and punish those who can't or won't. This is why you see so many adults who routinely say "ugh, I haaaated math in school" or science, or english, or essay writing, or computer science, etc. Those subjects are vibrant, fascinating, exciting, rich, and interesting areas of study. Studying math and computer science can be playful, fun, and inventive. But when crushed under mountains of drudgery all of that is lost and the result is that people end up cut off from learning those things and they lose their enthusiasm for studying.
csense 10y ago
> phonics Very interesting reading at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics#History_and_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics#History_and_controvers... that phonics goes all the way back to the 1830's. I just remember the Hooked on Phonics commercials (if you're too young to remember those, see Youtube).

GregBuchholz 10y ago

>We had to break the old whole reading method and switch over to phonics, and that was decades after we had the hard scientific evidence that phonics was the missing perspective needed to get that last percentage of students to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Spread_of_the_alphabet_and_its_social_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Spread_of_...

taeric 10y ago
I'm not clear on what the link is supposed to be getting me. Phonetics and Phoenician are two different things. Right?
- jdmichal 10y ago
  I agree that the post is severely underspecified. I think the point is the last paragraph of the linked section: > Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations which came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script. Its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of writing systems only being learned and employed by members of the royal and religious hierarchies of society, who used writing as an instrument of power to control access to information by the larger population.[11] The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms such as Assyria, Babylonia and Adiabene would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the Common Era. That is, Phoenician was the first wide-spread phonetic script. That, in turn, had major effects on civilizations as it was simple enough for commoners to learn. That being the rather tenuous link back to the original idea of teaching reading based on phonetics. Of course, there is a bit of a gap here, in that English phonetics are notoriously unstandardized across the lexicon.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > Phoenician was the first wide-spread phonetic script. That, in turn, had major effects on civilizations as it was simple enough for commoners to learn. The cuneiform of the time was, at heart, a syllabic script; while a phonetic script is arguably simpler, it's not much simpler. The real problem with cuneiform is not that it was syllabic instead of alphabetic, it's that you had plenty of options other than syllabic representation, as well. (And written Egyptian, the parent system of the Phoenician alphabet, was already genuinely phonetic! It didn't have vowels, but neither did the Phoenician script.) All that said, that sort of shortcut-encrustation seems to develop naturally within all writing systems. If I send someone "have a good day" and get back "u 2", that's exactly the kind of shortcut that we blast ancient writing systems for using. But that shortcut, in modern English, actually represents a very high literacy rate, and use of the writing system by someone who can't be bothered to observe its formal conventions. Under low-literacy conditions, educated people tend to scrupulously observe whatever weird conventions their writing system might have. That's how you know they're educated.
    - jdmichal 10y ago
      I'm assuming by Egyptian you mean Hieroglyphics. (They also used Hieratic and later Demotic.) Hieroglyphics are a mixed phonetic-logographic system. Even on the phonetic side, there are many ways to spell the same set of consonants, thanks to the existence of digraphs and trigraphs and repetition. The vowels probably differed, but those aren't written. The spelling for a particular word was usually fixed, though. Wikipedia has an excellent example using nfr in its determinatives section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determinatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determina... So, Hieroglyphics had phonetic components, but it was far from being a phonetic abjad like Phoenician. (An abjad is an alphabet without vowel markers.)
      - thaumasiotes 10y ago
        Hieroglyphics are a mixed phonetic-logographic system in the same way that English is a mixed phonetic-logographic system, where the second person pronoun can be represented by "you" or by the logograph u. How much is that hurting our literacy rate?
- GregBuchholz 10y ago
  Sorry. I just found it amusing, that here we are, using the English alphabet (a descendant of the original Phoenician alphabet) talking as if phonetics as a reading aid is a new phenomena. But the whole reason the Phoenician alphabet became so popular 3200 years ago was it's use of symbols representing spoken sounds.
  - 13of40 10y ago
    Maybe the point is that deemphasized the phonics technique for 3000 years and focused more on lessons like this: https://books.google.com/books?id=E-diAAAAcAAJ&dq=reading&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q=reading&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=E-diAAAAcAAJ&dq=reading&pg...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

projektir 10y ago

> Having worked with many of my fellow graduate students to try to teach CS concepts to incoming students without any CS background my conclusion here is that we simply don't know how to teach computer science. My suspicion is that many people who learn CS usually do it inspite of attempts to teach them, not because of instruction. I have this assumption about almost all organized learning at this time. I think that's also why things like IQ/g/etc. look so important - they make the learning "in spite of" more tractable, because you have enough of a buffer to deal with even really bad information at a very fast pace, and because high IQ students will make one's education methods look good even if they're terrible.

caseymarquis 10y ago
The ironic conclusion is that the most selective institutions could offer the worst environment and still boast about high levels of post-institutional success.
- projektir 10y ago
  Having gone to a relatively selective institution, that was definitely my impression of the place...

jaykru 10y ago

This analogy fails when you consider Chinese and similarly encoded written systems. Sure, there are methods employed that use radicals in order to provide phonetic "hints," but written Chinese is predominantly acquired through rote memorization. Many countries that use written Chinese today have comparable literacy rates to countries that use syllabic and phonetic systems. What have they done right that took phonics for us to do?

hyperion2010 10y ago
I think the difference here is that reading is considered to be so important that people don't just stop if a child doesn't learn it. The child will end up spending an enormous amount of time studying something when another technique might allow them to learn it more quickly. There is no similar equivalent for learning how to program. No one is going to prevent a student from graduating college until they figure out how to read and write a computer program, and you sure as hell can't prevent them from going out to play.

YZF 10y ago

The biggest problem with teaching reading is that not everyone is ready or interested in learning how to read at the same age. Studying why we can't force a random group of 7 year olds to learn how to read is missing the point. We homeschool. One of my daughters became a fluent reader very early. The other when she was a few years older. You can't force people or children to learn something they're not interested or aren't ready (for various reasons) to learn which unfortunately is basically what the educational system is built around. It's really less about methods which make a marginal difference. The problem with higher education is that we are still forcing people into those programs. If you want to make a good salary you take CS. Whether you have any interest or passion in that area is not relevant. Whatever your level of mathematical maturity is not relevant. You are of the right age and you want a successful career that's where you go. It's no wonder that teaching all those people CS is going to be difficult. It's still the same faulty approach to education. Everything can be taught and everyone can be taught and if it doesn't work we just need to find a better way of force feeding them. Compounding that even further is that teaching is difficult under the best of circumstances. In higher education it's often researchers who are asked to teach (or students) and while they may be brilliant on an intellectual level it doesn't necessarily make them good teachers. EDIT: And a thought on the bi-modality ... I would expect to be able to see this sort of modality at the output of a CS program. I would expect modality amongst students who graduated with the same grades. I would be really surprised if students graduating with the same grades perform similarly in software development tasks. Not clear to me what a CS grade means and how they relate to any natural abilities to e.g. write computer programs.

abecedarius 10y ago

That "old whole reading method" seems to be a 20th-C. thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_education_in_the_United_States#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_education_in_the_Unite... preceded by phonics-ish learning.

uAren_tWong 10y ago

I have taught some, and the most successful technique I employed was much the same as what a compiler does with chunking packets of instructions for the assembler. It's fairly logical, actually very logical, inasmuch as it is to think that the human mind can process things in some discrete amount, and then move that data to the hindbrain and ready the visuo-spatial cortex for more. Repetition is key for this to happen, yet we don't really reiterate a lot (well, in my humble experience) of the things we learn as CS students, other than the bajillion attempts to code properly on our own. We do things maybe twice, three times, then we take some notes or move on to a different part of the subject. The brain needs a 'lot' of repetition to have something down like we do things that require muscle memory. So, how to make something that would, on its face, appear tedious into a feature set? Well, again, from my humble teaching experience, and to extend the muscle memory analogy: muscle confusion! Mix up the media used to teach, and be creative about it. Don't just copy paste a slideshow from a dataset that some UW prof has put together, and then add a video from a YouTube tut, and call that a multimedia presentation (no offense, I know teaching is fucking hard, I'm being ideal here). Instead, MAKE UP a cool little ditty about what constitutes a class declaration (punny, no?) and then couple that with a dance that entails the two dancers to be logical constructs like XOR and NOT and have a little memory register ho-down...lol. Ok, well like I said, muscle confusion, but with the various lobes of e mind being entertained and enervated, booooi (said to the voice of Flava-Flav). IF in doubt, simply go piece by piece, building larger chunks of data for he students to learn and reiterate over each new chunk aggregating the last until the entire set of concepts is learned well enough to be determined comprehensive.

InclinedPlane 10y ago

We don't know how to teach fuckall. We basically shove a bunch of crap and resources in students' faces, and we hope that they can manage to teach themselves anything of value. Once in a blue moon there's a teacher who truly knows how to get their students to learn well (I've had more than my fair share in my academic career, that's for sure, but even so it was a tiny minority), most "teaching" is basically just cargo culting and going through the motions to "cover the material". So of course we see a pattern of folks who don't have as much support for learning outside of school tend to be at a disadvantage except in rare cases. Most education is practically coincidental to the process, a matter of osmosis and expectations as much as anything else. And in truth if you take a recently minted college graduate off the line and do some truly in depth tests of the quality of their education you'll find it sorely lacking in almost all cases, no matter their GPA, alma matter, or major. Education is a bit like journalism. You find in journalism that whenever a story comes out in a subject you are intimately familiar with it's riddled with errors, inaccuracies, half-truths, and sometimes worse. Which makes you wonder about the rest (it's the same). In education you find that once you acquire a sound and thorough understanding of a topic you look at the way it's taught and see a lot of busy work, almost no concentration on the fundamentals, and a constant pattern of "keeping pace" even as most of the class gets left behind and typically only retains enough knowledge to pass the tests by sheer force of will (memorization, test taking techniques, and trial and error). For me the best STEM classes in college were always the ones where you had to apply your knowledge, but those classes were too rare and not as well attended as the mandatory classes. Unfortunately, a lot of institutional education in STEM fields suffers from several fundamental difficulties. For one there's is the common perspective that "it's supposed to be hard", and so curricula are tuned to weed out those who can't tough it through. For another, there's a tremendous focus on rote memorization, busy work, and trivia versus practical, applied, core knowledge. Real life is not like an episode of Jeopardy, the vast majority of the time you are better off with having a sound understanding of the fundamentals and the ability to look up or pick up any specifics or trivia as needed. This is true whether we're talking about CS, math, chemistry, physics, or what-have-you. Yet consistently the system is setup to reward the folks who are able and willing to suffer through most of that useless memorization and busywork and punish those who can't or won't. This is why you see so many adults who routinely say "ugh, I haaaated math in school" or science, or english, or essay writing, or computer science, etc. Those subjects are vibrant, fascinating, exciting, rich, and interesting areas of study. Studying math and computer science can be playful, fun, and inventive. But when crushed under mountains of drudgery all of that is lost and the result is that people end up cut off from learning those things and they lose their enthusiasm for studying.

csense 10y ago

> phonics Very interesting reading at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics#History_and_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics#History_and_controvers... that phonics goes all the way back to the 1830's. I just remember the Hooked on Phonics commercials (if you're too young to remember those, see Youtube).