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I'm so glad to see this message out there; a frustratingly small number of people are aware of the 1984(ish) peak in females in the field. My mom taught comput

by blahedo 15y ago

I'm so glad to see this message out there; a frustratingly small number of people are aware of the 1984(ish) peak in females in the field. My mom taught computer programming (Fortran) in a Chicago high school from 1967 until 1984, and was actually kind of surprised when I first asked her about gender balance issues in the field—they just weren't an issue then, and her classes were always more or less balanced. But what they also were was everyone's very first exposure to a computer. Without exception, her students had never written any sort of program before, and they were recruited from good students in the math and physics classes, coming to programming with an open mind and no preconceptions. (A lot of them, girls and boys both, went into technical computer-related fields.) The change, as has been noted elsewhere on this page, surely has to do with the introduction of computers, but my hypothesis is that it wasn't just home PCs (not in the 80s) but classroom PCs that were the problem: in a lot of places, computers in the classroom were a fad and showed up with no training of the teachers, so they sat in the back or the side, mostly unused... unless one or two of the students pestered the teacher to play with the computer, and then used the manual and/or trial and error to figure it out. Guess which students were doing that more? But that, I think, wouldn't be enough. The knowledge should equalise after one or maybe two terms of college CS, right? But I'm pretty sure the real problem was that professors inadvertently reinforced and magnified the difference between students who'd had previous computer experience (primarily boys) and students who hadn't (of both genders). It turns out that as a teacher, it's very, very easy to look around the classroom, see that X% of the students seem to be getting something, and decide to move on. (You can't wait for 100%, usually, so it's always a judgement call.) That's fine if it's something you've taught well and only the weak students are struggling, but what if it's something you absentmindedly glossed over? Half the class understands it, so you must have covered it, right? This is very insidious, and even being aware of it is not always enough to combat it; and if the divide of "has experience" vs "no experience" partially reflects a gender divide, that divide will only get reinforced.

maco 15y ago
Have you seen this article? http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs-with-an-obscure-functional-programming-language/ http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs... One way teachers can even the CS 101 playing field is by doing something totally different than what the kids taught themselves or learned in high school (which is probably object oriented programming, these days).
- klipt 15y ago
  The tone of that article seems to be "some college students are trying to game our grading system by learning programming in advance. Let's crush them by making them program in an obscure language!" To me that sounds like "some elementary school students are trying to game our grading system by learning reading in advance. Let's crush them by making them read in an obscure language!"
  - _delirium 15y ago
    I agree it's tricky to do anything about it without seeming absurd, but I can also see the motivation. One semester isn't very long, so it's easy for incoming knowledge to completely swamp whatever a course could teach in 14 weeks. But if the goal of CS101 is to put people on track to a CS degree, and the purpose of grading is to give some indication of performance, having CS101 grades completely dominated by incoming knowledge rather than some sort of signal of ability-to-learn seems unfortunate. On the other hand, this is true to some extent in other fields. For example, hobbyist writers, which these days includes kids who write long-form blog pieces, will tend to breeze through introductory portions of humanities curricula, since grades are often dominated by simple writing ability. If you can already throw together a coherent 5-page essay without having to learn how as a freshman, you're way ahead of the average 1st-year.
    - klipt 15y ago
      By the same token, a hobbyist robotocist would breeze through engineering courses. I'm sure there are good ways to deal with unequal skills - why not let the skilled people test out of the class and save time getting to a more advanced class? But the way the article frowns on prior preparation as "gaming the grading system" hints at a desire to trample down the tall poppies rather than to improve everyone's experience.
    - robryan 15y ago
      I'd say it's true in almost every field. Usually the person with previous programming experience because they were interested to self guide themselves through it will be the better programmer and may stay that way all throughout college. They may get higher marks but it certainly isn't hard enough that those just coming in can't pass also.

by blahedo 15y ago

maco 15y ago

Have you seen this article? http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs-with-an-obscure-functional-programming-language/ http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs... One way teachers can even the CS 101 playing field is by doing something totally different than what the kids taught themselves or learned in high school (which is probably object oriented programming, these days).

klipt 15y ago
The tone of that article seems to be "some college students are trying to game our grading system by learning programming in advance. Let's crush them by making them program in an obscure language!" To me that sounds like "some elementary school students are trying to game our grading system by learning reading in advance. Let's crush them by making them read in an obscure language!"
- _delirium 15y ago
  I agree it's tricky to do anything about it without seeming absurd, but I can also see the motivation. One semester isn't very long, so it's easy for incoming knowledge to completely swamp whatever a course could teach in 14 weeks. But if the goal of CS101 is to put people on track to a CS degree, and the purpose of grading is to give some indication of performance, having CS101 grades completely dominated by incoming knowledge rather than some sort of signal of ability-to-learn seems unfortunate. On the other hand, this is true to some extent in other fields. For example, hobbyist writers, which these days includes kids who write long-form blog pieces, will tend to breeze through introductory portions of humanities curricula, since grades are often dominated by simple writing ability. If you can already throw together a coherent 5-page essay without having to learn how as a freshman, you're way ahead of the average 1st-year.
  - klipt 15y ago
    By the same token, a hobbyist robotocist would breeze through engineering courses. I'm sure there are good ways to deal with unequal skills - why not let the skilled people test out of the class and save time getting to a more advanced class? But the way the article frowns on prior preparation as "gaming the grading system" hints at a desire to trample down the tall poppies rather than to improve everyone's experience.
  - robryan 15y ago
    I'd say it's true in almost every field. Usually the person with previous programming experience because they were interested to self guide themselves through it will be the better programmer and may stay that way all throughout college. They may get higher marks but it certainly isn't hard enough that those just coming in can't pass also.