acbart

19 ms·

181.
by acbart 8y ago
Wow, just read that bit about "HtDP and Colleagues". What a pretentious bit of writing with no actual arguments. The strawman they propose is just one argument, and is not the one I would reach for when arguing against Racket in C
182.
by acbart 8y ago
I much prefer divergent stacked bar charts for likert/1-5 ratings, rather than these side-by-side bar charts. It's really hard to compare the distributions. Even a box plot would be better, I think.
183.
by acbart 8y ago
I do Computing Education research, so being able to access learners is actually a necessary part. I guess it'd be possible to do this externally, but it's so hard to roll out new ed tech without quick access to an audience. But mo
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by acbart 8y ago
Have you gone through SIGCSE related materials? Checked out the CS Ed Researcher's Facebook group? Maybe looked into the CS Ed Stack Exchange? There's a whole, deep world of CS Ed pedagogy and practice that can probably dramatical
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by acbart 8y ago
The potential for accessibility seems massive here!
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by acbart 8y ago
Question: Why does my head hurt? Aristo is not sure about this one... Aristo's best guess: It hurts because you're alive. Confidence: 19.04%
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by acbart 8y ago
I think you should also consider letting them use the more modern learning environments for kids, too. It's hard to do fun things in Turbo Pascal, but it's easy to do fun things in languages like Scratch ([Jr]), Racket, and Python
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by acbart 8y ago
It's graded immediately (automatically), so there wouldn't be any issues. Further, the text of the problem makes it clear that I'm not actually going to check their age - they can return any valid number (although it does che
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The Intro Computer Programming Course Is First and Foremost a LANGUAGE Course(delivery.acm.org)
1 points by acbart 8y ago|0 comments
190.
by acbart 8y ago
This is awesome, and could be a fun project for introductory students. It gives practice with: - Extracting digits from numbers (easily done with a few function calls in Python, or some math) - Calculating frequency of a known set of items
191.
by acbart 8y ago
I have a series of programming assignments in my introductory course that has students write simple functions in Python. One of those functions is to consume nothing and returns their (the programmer's) current age. So for example, you
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by acbart 8y ago
Cool "anthropology" method. This triggered my interest to go look at the C source code for linux[1]. Turns out the command actually relies on a few different files, including a "remove.h"[2]. I was surprised I didn'
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by acbart 9y ago
This sounds like it's gearing up to some Myers Briggs or Learning Styles garbage. I don't think you'll get very far with correlating personalities with code. I think you might be able to learn some temporary behavioral traits
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by acbart 9y ago
Miller's Law - The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory. I actually needed to research this claim for my dissertation, and found that some researchers believe it is more complex than
195.
by acbart 9y ago
I was going to write that I disagree with you, but according to the Taulbee survey this is true: The percentage of Ph.D. graduates who took North American academic jobs rose in 2015-16 for the second straight year, to 30.7 fro
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by acbart 9y ago
In my introductory programming class, we teach a few basic forms of chart visualization. By far, students struggle the most with Histograms. Even more frustrating, they love line plots and attempt to use them everywhere. Despite my explanat
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by acbart 9y ago
So what is the state of the art in turning text into speech files in Python? Especially in terms of free options? Everything I find on google seems to be a year or two out of date.
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by acbart 10y ago
I had to use Tabula to extract a decade of SAT scores from PDFs for each state/year. It was a nightmare, but I managed it. More recently, I was hoping to do something similar with decennial census data, but it was just too much. Far, f
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by acbart 10y ago
> Trump's website requires a captcha to view static content. I'm not particularly adept at security. Why would this occur?
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by acbart 10y ago
The trick to teaching pointers is to model memory with boxes. You have a stack, and a heap, and you draw arrows to represent pointers. At some point, you need to reveal that those arrows are just numeric indices, but the visual helps early
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by acbart 10y ago
This is not very accessible for people with weak statistical backgrounds.
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by acbart 10y ago
Having had to write in Scribble, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, and a other similar environments, I'm very surprised everyone is that excited about Scribble. It's not bad, but it was never a game changer for me. Is it just because of the
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by acbart 10y ago
You did not talk about the necessity of unlinking the results of high-stakes testing and the funding for schools/teachers/districts. Or at the very least, to not penalize low-income areas for low test scores by stripping their bud
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by acbart 10y ago
Common Core, in theory, isn't a problem - unifying standards across schools has a lot of benefits (easier to design reusable curriculums, perform scientific inquiries, develop software). The problem is when it gets conflated with high-
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by acbart 10y ago
So is Cubes an interface for Bubbles? I'm having a hard time figuring out the connection between them.
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by acbart 10y ago
Although this is an interesting post, I'm disappointed from a pedagogical point of view. The article covers these topics, in this order: 1. What book do we assign? 2. What should we lecture? 3. What sort of code review work should we h
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by acbart 10y ago
I assume that this is sarcasm?
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by acbart 10y ago
Any way to make histograms conveniently with this system? Can't seem to find anything. That'd be the major thing preventing me from switching away from D3.
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by acbart 11y ago
Is this closed source?
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by acbart 11y ago
Precisely correct! Adding authenticity and relevance to the first major learning experience is crucial for appealing to a wide array of beginners, especially people who don't necessarily see programming as a first-order joy.

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