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Teaching Computing with... Computers?
- anigbrowl 17y agoWhat, no comments? Both sides have some valid points. From the NSF point of view, it is hard to teach abstraction and they also want to develop teaching materials that don't rely on expensive and proprietary educational toys. Then again Bogost reasonably asks how you can expect kids to stick with the program when you move from the toy to a screen of code. I wish he had explored his alternative ideas further (although the comments do pick up where he left off). Computer games can definitely be used to teach basic concepts, and indeed some very good games have used programming-type puzzles as part of the gameplay. A kid-friendly programming interface, to me, could just be a skin on a full programming environment. As you would complete basic programming tasks, you could then unlock higher level features.
- Allocator2008 17y agoI have to disagree with this blogger. I think CS Unplugged is a great idea. Djikstra himself said that computer science has as little to do with computers, as astronomy has to do with telescopes. Telescopes are a tool for study in astronomy. But astronomy itself is a study of the stars. Similarly, computers (PC's, mainframes, iPhones, and everything in between) are tools for the study of computation. But the object of study is not the computers. It is computation itself - algorithms, encryption, etc. etc. The computer is not the algorithm. The computer demonstrates the algorithm but it itself is not the algorithm. The telescope is not the star. It shows the star but it is not the star. CS Unplugged is doing the exact right thing in my opinion.
- hc 17y agothis sounds like the "new math"... why not start young children with actual programming? programming is _easier_ and more intuitive than thinking abstractly about algorithms and compression