acbart

11 ms·

121.
by acbart 7y ago
Looking over the robots they support, low cost means about "thousands of dollars" in this context, right?
122.
by acbart 7y ago
Indeed, we do talk more about good contracts with the Turtle alphabet than we do about global state. But it's a small part of the conversation. The `World` (which is based on the concept from Racket's Universe library) does indeed
123.
by acbart 7y ago
The objection is because of testing, debugging, and getting compiler/autograder feedback. Obviously, global data is powerful and allows us to do a lot. I let my students define top-level functions and use them globally throughout their
124.
by acbart 7y ago
Hi, thanks for your response and your passion for CS Ed! I like talking about it too, and I want to preface any conversation we have with my appreciation that we both care about this important subject. Text doesn't always do a good job
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by acbart 7y ago
Thanks! I wasn't aware of this library, so this is exactly what I was hoping to hear as an answer. I'll add it to our list to analyze.
126.
by acbart 7y ago
I'm very interested in this project, because I have a student researching what good options there are for Python Game Dev at the CS1 level. We used Arcade[1] this past Fall, and things didn't go very well (I'm not sold on Pyg
127.
by acbart 7y ago
I thought that one of the major points of WASM was that it would be fast? The first advantage listed on the official WebAssembly website is "Efficient and fast" [0]. But I suppose you wrote "the point" - it's just o
128.
by acbart 7y ago
Well if we're talking about K-8, that's probably true. I don't know about high school. For undergraduate students, you better believe that they'll find out what languages are "real" and "not real" ver
129.
by acbart 7y ago
I've run a lot of surveys of introductory students trying to find what topics are more or less interesting to them. A part of my dissertation was committed to it, actually. At this point, I'm more or less certain you'll rarel
130.
by acbart 7y ago
You will find very few students eager to learn Pascal in 2019 as their first introductory language. I say this as someone who grew up in the 90s with my father's Pascal textbook and a deep love for Turbo Pascal.
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by acbart 7y ago
Python.
132.
by acbart 7y ago
Isn't it amazing how people pass courses, even perhaps demonstrate mastery at a point in time, but manage to get to later courses without fully understanding things? Students end up with a very strange mental framework by the time they
133.
by acbart 7y ago
I'm assuming you have some concrete curriculum in mind, but I'm curious how what you're thinking of compares to something like the learning objectives spelled out in the CS Curricula 2013[0]? Personally, going through OP&#x27
134.
by acbart 7y ago
I started teaching my introductory Computer Science class with static types this past Fall. Although there's a slightly larger initial learning curve, the long term benefits are pretty massive. I have to do more data analysis, but my s
135.
by acbart 7y ago
Hah! Reminds me of Piet: http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html
136.
by acbart 7y ago
This speaks to me. I used to spend my childhood tweaking and retweaking my game engines. Never really got my games past the cool demo phase. I guess I also now stay with maintainable systems too.
137.
by acbart 7y ago
Wait, what the heck, why did they pick what is apparently a popular hate symbol for white supremacists? The first google result takes me to: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/1488
138.
by acbart 7y ago
Or that the material will be taught effectively. Or that the students are contextually prepared to understand the material at that point. Or any of a number of other things that go wrong when people suggest that education is the solution&#x
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by acbart 7y ago
Yes, this exactly. I'm an assistant professor who's fine with my salary and position, but I can see firsthand how difficult it is to recruit and retain excellent colleagues.
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by acbart 7y ago
Negroponte really boofed up with the One-Laptop-Per-Child project. It had a lot of good intentions, but it's such a textbook example of misguided tech folks inserting themselves into an education setting. From this article, sounds like
141.
by acbart 7y ago
I was forced to encounter Web2Py in an open-source project several years ago. It was awful. Besides the fact that it's stuck in Python 2 (seriously, even today?), it had a lot of bizarre design decisions. For instance, it loaded contro
142.
by acbart 7y ago
One of the biggest problems is that these language designers, who want to design an "idealized" language, continue to make big decisions without regards to any kind of actual data collection. I just had the chance to meet and talk
143.
by acbart 7y ago
Great! I'm glad you found a path to computing, that is truly wonderful! And I'm not surprised that this approach worked so well for someone. Now, let's make sure we're finding ways that can generalize. It's an impor
144.
by acbart 7y ago
There are many scholarly CSE venues. Ironically, this subgroup mostly avoids almost all of them except ICER, because they feel persecuted. Since I'm relatively new, I'm not clear if the persecution caused their rudeness or vice ve
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by acbart 7y ago
I went in and killed the relevant CSS - hopefully that makes it a little easier to read?
146.
by acbart 7y ago
I would certainly accept a wide range of other languages. I picked Python because I think I and many of my colleagues can teach a good CS1 in Python. I'm open to a lot of other options. But not Haskell. Please don't say Haskell :)
147.
by acbart 7y ago
And I hope you will learn some empathy some day and understand the perspective of others. We all have some growing to do, it seems.
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by acbart 7y ago
> How stable has racket been compared to the alternatives? Why does the stability of Racket matter? Isn't the real question more about how easy it is to reuse, readopt, reshare, find, etc. materials? I'll point out that the C
149.
by acbart 7y ago
> Some research is better than none. Yes, so we should look at the relatively more massive amount of research done for languages like Java, Python, etc. SIGCSE and ICER and ITiCSE are full of them. We've learned a lot - learning is
150.
by acbart 7y ago
What kind of context are you looking for? What audience? Is a book the only option? In general, people learn from presentation of material, participation to demonstrate understanding, and then receiving feedback. They need to be motivated a

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