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It's upsetting to see how children's and young people's education gets dumbed down. I went to a toy shop earlier this week and the kits for scientific experimen

by jll29 4y ago

It's upsetting to see how children's and young people's education gets dumbed down. I went to a toy shop earlier this week and the kits for scientific experiments (chemistry, electronics) have been dumbed down compared to the 1980s. Back then, you had a huge box with chemicals and tools and a proper 100+ page handbook full of experimental instructions (chemistry) or resistors, transistors capacitors etc, and a handbook full of design schemas that you may want to construct e.g. a little radios (electronics). Now you can do "20 safe experiments" like making a LED flash. In computing, students want to do their coursework on their iPad in a notebook environment, relying mostly on step-by-step instructions given as PDF file or from an online tutorial, based on copy & paste, without understanding what they paste there instead of compiling libraries or write a makefiles from scratch. Starting next summer, I will include a 2-3 hour UNIX command line (and also a 2-3 hour LaTeX) intro into all courses I teach where that can be justified. (The UNIX Power Tools [1] book is a useful resource for teaching, I found in the past.) [1] https://www.amazon.de/Unix-Power-Tools-Classique-Us/dp/0596003307 https://www.amazon.de/Unix-Power-Tools-Classique-Us/dp/05960...

heavyset_go 4y ago
> Starting next summer, I will include a 2-3 hour UNIX command line (and also a 2-3 hour LaTeX) intro into all courses I teach where that can be justified. (The UNIX Power Tools [1] book is a useful resource for teaching, I found in the past.) That's great to hear. If I were in a position to introduce students to the terminal, I'd also try to expose them to the existence some modern CLI tools so they don't feel like they're trapped in the 1970's. Something like Starship, tmux/byobu, enabling colors, exa/lsd for ls replacements, dust for a modern take on du, easy terminal editors like micro to ease students into editing text in the terminal, along with mentioning how Vim/Emacs can be used in places of editors/IDEs. They'll get to see that the terminal is both modern and relevant, with ample use of color, font weighting, emojis, images, text GUIs, window management via tmux, etc. I obviously wouldn't make that the focus, but as a quick aside about the tools they can use with some screenshots or screensharing my own terminal setup might keep some students interested.

by jll29 4y ago

heavyset_go 4y ago

> Starting next summer, I will include a 2-3 hour UNIX command line (and also a 2-3 hour LaTeX) intro into all courses I teach where that can be justified. (The UNIX Power Tools [1] book is a useful resource for teaching, I found in the past.) That's great to hear. If I were in a position to introduce students to the terminal, I'd also try to expose them to the existence some modern CLI tools so they don't feel like they're trapped in the 1970's. Something like Starship, tmux/byobu, enabling colors, exa/lsd for ls replacements, dust for a modern take on du, easy terminal editors like micro to ease students into editing text in the terminal, along with mentioning how Vim/Emacs can be used in places of editors/IDEs. They'll get to see that the terminal is both modern and relevant, with ample use of color, font weighting, emojis, images, text GUIs, window management via tmux, etc. I obviously wouldn't make that the focus, but as a quick aside about the tools they can use with some screenshots or screensharing my own terminal setup might keep some students interested.