5 ms·

Real Tales of Learning Computer Science as a High School Girl

71 points by borski 14y ago

gcv 14y ago
An interesting side note from one of the stories: "some universities with multiple colleges house [English and computer science] in different schools, making double majoring... impossible." These universities demonstrate remarkable short-sightedness. Studying different subjects, particularly at the undergraduate level, makes people intellectually well-rounded and far more interesting. Imagine telling Leonardo that he cannot study painting and engineering at the same time.
- pyre 14y ago
  Imagine telling the engineers that they might have to mingle with the mendicants! As an anecdote, at U of Michigan the arts college is called LS&A (Literature, Science and the Arts), but the Engineering school students referred to it as LS&Play (at least circa 2000).
  - realitygrill 14y ago
    that moniker is still popular
  - lambdasquirrel 14y ago
    At CMU, we called Humanities and Social Sciences "high school studies." In retrospect, it was kind of immature and shortsighted. Social psych was one of the most valuable classes I took, and I found I was missing the kinds of literature classes I had in high school.
    - majormajor 14y ago
      Somewhere I think I still have an "Imaginary Engineering" t-shirt from a couple of years spent as an IE major. Learned some fascinating stuff that was quite useful after switching to CS and has also been quite useful in my career. It's fascinating, in retrospect, the things people will come up with to try to make themselves feel superior.
    - novum 14y ago
      I'm an alumnus of H&SS. I majored in Information Systems, which is (amusingly, I still think) in H&SS rather than the Tepper School of Business or the School of Computer Science. Sure, we had some occasional teasing ("H and Less Stress" was another one) but I found it invaluable to go through H&SS' general studies curriculum. Everyone in H&SS studies philosophy, history, communications, economics, writing, and math (among others) in addition to their core major classes.
    - dgabriel 14y ago
      I thought it was H&Less Stress.
- ken 14y ago
  In practice, at least at my university, this wasn't as big a deal as it sounds. A normal single-major doesn't mean you only take classes in one department. A double-major typically means you use major A's elective slots to take the core classes for major B, and vice versa. The upshot is that as a double-major, after sophomore year I would have no time to take any classes outside of those 2 departments. Counter-intuitive as it seems, staying a single-major allowed me to take a much greater variety of classes.
- pnathan 14y ago
  Agreed. It seems to me that the highest level of CS education possible is a combination of theoretical CS, programming, as well as a ferocious study of the humanities. The best and the highest goal (in my opinion, obviously) is to build a wide understanding of the world around you, integrating many different thought processes and situations into your daily existence. Programming is "easy". Software engineering is something we learn in industry. Why should we be trained in those - let's get educated?
- neutronicus 14y ago
  I was very happy that the School of Engineering allowed me to avoid humanities classes. I didn't much care for them. This was a common attitude among my classmates.
- Jach 14y ago
  > Imagine telling Leonardo that he cannot study painting and engineering at the same time. Bad example. Imagine Leonardo attending any modern day university for education. It's also a bad example because Leonardo did much, much more than painting and engineering. I do agree it's a bad idea to split students by degree by more than a few miles, though. I'd avoid any school that did that.
gaius 14y ago
I am flagging every post that is about someone's gender, they always degenerate into flaming and oneupmanship (no pun intended).
- ionforce 14y ago
  Oneupsperson.
Tichy 14y ago
Nice pictures with flowers in the background. Framing...
marquis 14y ago
This was a very interesting read, it hit home and I wish I had been given this opportunity. My own story of being 15 and showing ability for programming? 'uh, the computer room is full of boys'. Don't underestimate the power of needing to be around your own gender as a teenager, or at least, the disturbance of being around just the other gender in an elective class. I'm sure some of you had similar experiences being male. I also regret not taking shop and car repair classes for the same reason - I didn't start coding again until in my early 20s when the passion to build kicked in after graduating with an arts degree where other women were around me also building things.
Zak 14y ago
The last response, from Ellie Abrams starts with 'What is that?' I asked my sophomore friend in chorus what the jumbled letters, numbers, returns, spaces, indents, and parentheses on her failed test meant. She shrugged and responded, 'It’s comp sci. I can’t understand it—this is all bullshit.' The only other sophomore friend I had was a boy, and he told me computer science was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. With only these two views on computer science to refer to, I entered my intro course clueless and under the impression that computer science was for boys. This struck me as somewhat oddly constructed. I'm sure her two friends were different from each other in a great many ways, but she settled on sex as the differentiating factor. She goes on to say To put it simply, the reason for [boys having a stronger CS background before taking the class] comes down to video games. Boys are expected sit in their dungeons of junk food and fiddle with their PlayStations and computers (I can’t even think of a popular video game to mention). That doesn't make much sense to me either. Most video games don't teach anything about computer science. They may serve as a vehicle to get children interested in what computers can do, but no CS skills are required to play Halo. More generally, parts of the responses seem forced. I get the impression that there was a fairly detailed question posed to these students with suggestions to address certain topics. For example, half the responses contain the word "humanities". I wouldn't expect most high school students to choose that word on their own. I'd expect to see more specific subjects like art, history or English. I'd really like to see the exact question they were asked.
- Swizec 14y ago
  "That doesn't make much sense to me either. Most video games don't teach anything about computer science. They may serve as a vehicle to get children interested in what computers can do, but no CS skills are required to play Halo." 1. First part of the answer is simple: Boys like videogames. They play videogames. Videogames are a great vehicle for getting interested in "Hmm, I wanna make a better awesomer videogame ... wonder how I go about doing that". Curiosity takes care of the rest. 2. It is, apparently, culturally acceptable for a boy to arse around on a computer all day, while the same does not hold true for a girl. This makes it harder for girls to learn subjects that take huge amounts of "being alone and thinking".
jlgreco 14y ago
I'm glad to hear that they are using Scheme in introductory programs like this. MIT stopping that just depresses me. I'm not sure what universities still do, except for North Eastern.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Colleges still have trouble trying to decide if they should provide a proper Computer Science education or if they should be software engineering trade schools. This is made all the more difficult because students enroll in CS programs but almost always what they typically want and need is the SE trade school education.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    A particularly aggravating problem when the college in question already have a separate software engineering major.
nevster 14y ago
Accessing this on the iPad I'm totally confused about how to read the actual article - what's up with their interface?
- sopooneo 14y ago
  I agree. It's abysmal. Each girl has a separate "slide" with a photo and blurb. Hit "next" near the top of the page (even the landing page) to progress through them.
- easp 14y ago
  Yeah, they are using an annoying tool called onSwipe that is supposed to deliver a delightful experience on the iPad. In reality, it delivers an aggravating experience on the iPad. I don't know why sites still use them. I had to switch to the desktop version, repeatedly, until it actually took, then everything worked fine.
  - rdl 14y ago
    Because they bribe the sites with ad revenue and promises to not have to develop a mobile version themselves, presumably. Which would be ok, if the OnSwipe user experience didn't suck so much for end users. I wish they'd publish a list of sites using onswipe so I could just skip those sites.
- Confusion 14y ago
  Ah, so I'm not actually a complete idiot for not understanding how to use OnSwipe.
- Pent 14y ago
  It took me awhile to figure out that I actually needed to click the photo to see the stories. I tried all the other links first.
rsanchez1 14y ago
I remember when I was in high school, I had a girl classmate who took AP Computer Science online to pad her resume and get into college. Somewhere along the line she starts asking for help and seeing how I was the only one who knew any programming I volunteered to help. I didn't know very much Java, just knew programming from learning Perl, but Java was easy enough to pick up. Initially, I was excited. Hey, here's this girl taking computer science. But towards the end, I think I'm the only one who walked away really learning Java and ended up "coaching" her through all her homework, basically just telling her what to type although trying to make sure she understood the concepts each step of the way. I ended up disappointed because she only wanted to pad her resume instead of really learn computer science. Maybe it was taking the class online that didn't let her get interested in the subject, or maybe she just wanted to get the grade and get it over with. The point is, I think we need to do a better job getting kids in general interested in computer science, not just girls, if we want more girls to go into computer science. Get rid of this misconception that it's just graybeards in a dark room hacking away through the night and put it in kids heads that computer science, or even just programming, is something everyone can do and have fun doing. And maybe try to de-emphasize getting a grade as a goal and emphasize actual learning as a goal. But most importantly, expand computer science availability in high school, so you don't have to resort to taking online classes, which I think are a bad idea in general but particularly bad for kids in high school who are still developing study habits.
- projct 14y ago
  It's also possible that she chose to rely on you for the easy grade as well...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

71 points by borski 14y ago

gcv 14y ago

An interesting side note from one of the stories: "some universities with multiple colleges house [English and computer science] in different schools, making double majoring... impossible." These universities demonstrate remarkable short-sightedness. Studying different subjects, particularly at the undergraduate level, makes people intellectually well-rounded and far more interesting. Imagine telling Leonardo that he cannot study painting and engineering at the same time.

pyre 14y ago
Imagine telling the engineers that they might have to mingle with the mendicants! As an anecdote, at U of Michigan the arts college is called LS&A (Literature, Science and the Arts), but the Engineering school students referred to it as LS&Play (at least circa 2000).
- realitygrill 14y ago
  that moniker is still popular
- lambdasquirrel 14y ago
  At CMU, we called Humanities and Social Sciences "high school studies." In retrospect, it was kind of immature and shortsighted. Social psych was one of the most valuable classes I took, and I found I was missing the kinds of literature classes I had in high school.
  - majormajor 14y ago
    Somewhere I think I still have an "Imaginary Engineering" t-shirt from a couple of years spent as an IE major. Learned some fascinating stuff that was quite useful after switching to CS and has also been quite useful in my career. It's fascinating, in retrospect, the things people will come up with to try to make themselves feel superior.
  - novum 14y ago
    I'm an alumnus of H&SS. I majored in Information Systems, which is (amusingly, I still think) in H&SS rather than the Tepper School of Business or the School of Computer Science. Sure, we had some occasional teasing ("H and Less Stress" was another one) but I found it invaluable to go through H&SS' general studies curriculum. Everyone in H&SS studies philosophy, history, communications, economics, writing, and math (among others) in addition to their core major classes.
  - dgabriel 14y ago
    I thought it was H&Less Stress.
ken 14y ago
In practice, at least at my university, this wasn't as big a deal as it sounds. A normal single-major doesn't mean you only take classes in one department. A double-major typically means you use major A's elective slots to take the core classes for major B, and vice versa. The upshot is that as a double-major, after sophomore year I would have no time to take any classes outside of those 2 departments. Counter-intuitive as it seems, staying a single-major allowed me to take a much greater variety of classes.
pnathan 14y ago
Agreed. It seems to me that the highest level of CS education possible is a combination of theoretical CS, programming, as well as a ferocious study of the humanities. The best and the highest goal (in my opinion, obviously) is to build a wide understanding of the world around you, integrating many different thought processes and situations into your daily existence. Programming is "easy". Software engineering is something we learn in industry. Why should we be trained in those - let's get educated?
neutronicus 14y ago
I was very happy that the School of Engineering allowed me to avoid humanities classes. I didn't much care for them. This was a common attitude among my classmates.
Jach 14y ago
> Imagine telling Leonardo that he cannot study painting and engineering at the same time. Bad example. Imagine Leonardo attending any modern day university for education. It's also a bad example because Leonardo did much, much more than painting and engineering. I do agree it's a bad idea to split students by degree by more than a few miles, though. I'd avoid any school that did that.

gaius 14y ago

I am flagging every post that is about someone's gender, they always degenerate into flaming and oneupmanship (no pun intended).

ionforce 14y ago
Oneupsperson.

Tichy 14y ago

Nice pictures with flowers in the background. Framing...

marquis 14y ago

This was a very interesting read, it hit home and I wish I had been given this opportunity. My own story of being 15 and showing ability for programming? 'uh, the computer room is full of boys'. Don't underestimate the power of needing to be around your own gender as a teenager, or at least, the disturbance of being around just the other gender in an elective class. I'm sure some of you had similar experiences being male. I also regret not taking shop and car repair classes for the same reason - I didn't start coding again until in my early 20s when the passion to build kicked in after graduating with an arts degree where other women were around me also building things.

Zak 14y ago

The last response, from Ellie Abrams starts with 'What is that?' I asked my sophomore friend in chorus what the jumbled letters, numbers, returns, spaces, indents, and parentheses on her failed test meant. She shrugged and responded, 'It’s comp sci. I can’t understand it—this is all bullshit.' The only other sophomore friend I had was a boy, and he told me computer science was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. With only these two views on computer science to refer to, I entered my intro course clueless and under the impression that computer science was for boys. This struck me as somewhat oddly constructed. I'm sure her two friends were different from each other in a great many ways, but she settled on sex as the differentiating factor. She goes on to say To put it simply, the reason for [boys having a stronger CS background before taking the class] comes down to video games. Boys are expected sit in their dungeons of junk food and fiddle with their PlayStations and computers (I can’t even think of a popular video game to mention). That doesn't make much sense to me either. Most video games don't teach anything about computer science. They may serve as a vehicle to get children interested in what computers can do, but no CS skills are required to play Halo. More generally, parts of the responses seem forced. I get the impression that there was a fairly detailed question posed to these students with suggestions to address certain topics. For example, half the responses contain the word "humanities". I wouldn't expect most high school students to choose that word on their own. I'd expect to see more specific subjects like art, history or English. I'd really like to see the exact question they were asked.

Swizec 14y ago
"That doesn't make much sense to me either. Most video games don't teach anything about computer science. They may serve as a vehicle to get children interested in what computers can do, but no CS skills are required to play Halo." 1. First part of the answer is simple: Boys like videogames. They play videogames. Videogames are a great vehicle for getting interested in "Hmm, I wanna make a better awesomer videogame ... wonder how I go about doing that". Curiosity takes care of the rest. 2. It is, apparently, culturally acceptable for a boy to arse around on a computer all day, while the same does not hold true for a girl. This makes it harder for girls to learn subjects that take huge amounts of "being alone and thinking".

jlgreco 14y ago

I'm glad to hear that they are using Scheme in introductory programs like this. MIT stopping that just depresses me. I'm not sure what universities still do, except for North Eastern.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Colleges still have trouble trying to decide if they should provide a proper Computer Science education or if they should be software engineering trade schools. This is made all the more difficult because students enroll in CS programs but almost always what they typically want and need is the SE trade school education.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  A particularly aggravating problem when the college in question already have a separate software engineering major.

nevster 14y ago

Accessing this on the iPad I'm totally confused about how to read the actual article - what's up with their interface?

sopooneo 14y ago
I agree. It's abysmal. Each girl has a separate "slide" with a photo and blurb. Hit "next" near the top of the page (even the landing page) to progress through them.
easp 14y ago
Yeah, they are using an annoying tool called onSwipe that is supposed to deliver a delightful experience on the iPad. In reality, it delivers an aggravating experience on the iPad. I don't know why sites still use them. I had to switch to the desktop version, repeatedly, until it actually took, then everything worked fine.
- rdl 14y ago
  Because they bribe the sites with ad revenue and promises to not have to develop a mobile version themselves, presumably. Which would be ok, if the OnSwipe user experience didn't suck so much for end users. I wish they'd publish a list of sites using onswipe so I could just skip those sites.
Confusion 14y ago
Ah, so I'm not actually a complete idiot for not understanding how to use OnSwipe.
Pent 14y ago
It took me awhile to figure out that I actually needed to click the photo to see the stories. I tried all the other links first.

rsanchez1 14y ago

I remember when I was in high school, I had a girl classmate who took AP Computer Science online to pad her resume and get into college. Somewhere along the line she starts asking for help and seeing how I was the only one who knew any programming I volunteered to help. I didn't know very much Java, just knew programming from learning Perl, but Java was easy enough to pick up. Initially, I was excited. Hey, here's this girl taking computer science. But towards the end, I think I'm the only one who walked away really learning Java and ended up "coaching" her through all her homework, basically just telling her what to type although trying to make sure she understood the concepts each step of the way. I ended up disappointed because she only wanted to pad her resume instead of really learn computer science. Maybe it was taking the class online that didn't let her get interested in the subject, or maybe she just wanted to get the grade and get it over with. The point is, I think we need to do a better job getting kids in general interested in computer science, not just girls, if we want more girls to go into computer science. Get rid of this misconception that it's just graybeards in a dark room hacking away through the night and put it in kids heads that computer science, or even just programming, is something everyone can do and have fun doing. And maybe try to de-emphasize getting a grade as a goal and emphasize actual learning as a goal. But most importantly, expand computer science availability in high school, so you don't have to resort to taking online classes, which I think are a bad idea in general but particularly bad for kids in high school who are still developing study habits.

projct 14y ago
It's also possible that she chose to rely on you for the easy grade as well...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]