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I also had a teacher in HS that taught Visual Basic in a computer programming class. Not VB.Net, but VB6, and this was 4 years ago. And they removed AP Compute
by nullgeo 13y ago
I also had a teacher in HS that taught Visual Basic in a computer programming class. Not VB.Net, but VB6, and this was 4 years ago.
And they removed AP Computer Science that same year, when I was about to take it, that's why I had to settle with the class that taught VB. The state of HS education in this country makes me sad.
- JoshGlazebrook 13y agoFour years ago? Jesus... Back in 10th grade (2007), I had the option of choosing a programming course, but I chose not to. But at least the class was teaching C++ and not VB6.
- yeukhon 13y agoIt used to be C++ for AP Computer Science, no? Anyhow. It used to be C++ for my high school and just a year or two before I was a freshman (that was 2006) it became Java.
- pflats 13y agoC++ was a short run, something like '99-'03. It was Pascal beforehand and Java afterwards. There's no AB course any more either. It's just one course, the equivalent of the old A.
- yeukhon 13y agoWhen did the whole VB thing come to the table? Probably left over from the old days in intro to cs in undergraduate?
- pflats 13y agoI imagine VB classes came for the most part in the mid to late 90s where it made GUI applications nice and easy. Compared to console applications and Logo, it was a nice way to give a first-time programmer a more fulfilling experience. I taught at a school with a VB 6.0 curriculum at the end of the last decade. The (veteran) teacher just continued using his old materials; he was a math teacher with some CS experience. He kept it because budgets were tight, everything ran snappily, and new computers and textbooks are expensive. As long as a teacher is teaching programming fundamentals, it really doesn't matter (in the long run, educationally) what a student's first language is. They'll get it. Better to go with something that the teacher's good at and that interests the students.
- javert 13y agoI went to high school from 2001 to 2005, and there wasn't any programming course. This was in the small-town US. Any form of VB is still computer programming, and would have been a big step up. > The state of HS education in this country makes me sad. Yes, and that is not going to change unless we privatize education.
- derleth 13y ago> Yes, and that is not going to change unless we privatize education. Because poor people don't really need to learn how to read! Yeah, go back to the glory days of the Forties. The Eighteen-Forties.
- javert 13y agoPoor people not learning to read does not follow from having privatized education. If in 100 years the government provided clothing, and I advocated privatizing clothing, you'd say, "Becuase poor people don't need to wear clothes!" Where I'm from (in the US), many poor people _don't_ achieve a basically acceptable level of education, because the public schools don't ultimately serve them well for various reasons, and they drop out (or just don't learn but keep getting passed on through the grades). We're talking like high schoolers at a 5th grade reading level, for example. So it's not like the status quo is a panacea.