Here at the IEUC we would very much like to hear from you about your experiences with any of these models. If you are a student or would like to share recollections of your student days, please email us so we can sample your opinions of what works and what doesn’t from a student’s perspective. Also if you’ve taught such a course, we would be equally eager to get your perspective as well!

In any case, we look forward to your email.

It won’t be easy at first, but it truly can change your life, and we are here to guide you through the process. All you have to do to start is to reach out and contact us!

We would very much like to hear from any faculty members offering programming courses this semester so we can compare notes on pedagogical approaches. Areas of interest to us are:

• At what level are you teaching?
• What language(s) have you chosen and why?
• How are you planning to balance theory and practice?
• What text(s) are you adopting?
• How do you evaluate your students’ progress?
• If you have previously taught similar courses, what concepts were the hardest to convey and how have you changed your approach as a result?

Students embarking on the study of computer programming, would do well to read How to Learn Programming Languages by Ben Deverett. This short article appearing in XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students provides a nice overview of why there are many programming languages and how to approach learning one.

We find the advice to consider a language’s historical origins particularly wise, although we would beg to differ somewhat with Mr. Deverett’s recommendations to learn a popular language when you need to use it which seem to make the tacit assumption that you will doing so to turn out a demo or production system (in which context they make perfect sense).

Instead, we recommend that you start to develop a solid theoretical understanding of programming languages before deadlines loom. This is best achieved with a LISP dialect or through reading a solid comparative study of multiple languages.

We hope you all had an enjoyable Labor Day weekend and a wonderful Summer as well.

Like you, we are most eager to kickoff the Fall Semester. Over the Summer we have been working towards a Mobile Friendly HTML5 revision of our web pages. But it may be some time before our new page templates are ready for production use. Making things as useable on a cell phone as a wide screen monitor is a serious design challenge that we are still grappling with.

There has been a lot of activity on the Public Policy front of late with a growing sense of urgency about the problem of Patent Trolls who are systematically targeting the engines of innovation in the computer industry, with attempts to use highly dubious Software Patents to go after corporate giants and solo developers alike.

At the IEUC we are closely monitoring this issue and will do our best to keep you informed.

On the Education front, we want to hear from students interested in learning to program and would very much like their thoughts on what works and what doesn’t in any programming courses they may be taking.

In terms of Research, our near term interests are tightly focused on End User Programming and finding ways to use multi-modal interfaces to make Computational Thinking easier to approach. We will probably be employing the latest generation of Web Browsers and/or Android as our research platform in this regard. So if you are a programmer and would like to help, please contact us!

Finally, we are always looking for volunteers and potential Board candidates to join our ranks.

As part of our ongoing educational and community outreach, we would like to hear from any students in Ossining, New York and the surrounding communities who are interested in learning to program computers and/or develop websites over the Summer.

Depending on the number of participants and their level of interest, instruction may be individualized via email correspondence or provided in person by having participants meet as a group somewhere in the community.

Instruction will be provided free of charge to suitably prepared students at the high school level and above. The Institute is happy to customize the material presented to best meet student needs from introductory level through advanced graduate topics.

We would also be happy to explore the possibility of providing similar services to any adults in the community who want to master such skills.

The IEUC would also like to work with any Pre-Service and In-Service Teachers who are currently teaching or would like to develop computer science course offerings for students in the area. We can help in identifying instructional materials and assist in curriculum development. If you are a teacher who wants to learn to program over the Summer so you can introduce your students to this exciting field in the Fall, one-on-one instruction can be provided.

We will also consider working with select students and teachers from other communities if we have sufficient time and resources to accommodate them.

By developing the new prototype High School in partnership with the City University of New York and situating it in New York City, this exciting project recognizes the growing importance of the New York Metro region as an alternative source of innovation to Silicon Valley on the West coast.

According to Mayor Bloomberg, who spoke at NBC’s “Education Nation” summit, when students “graduate from grade 14 with an associate’s degree and a qualified record, they will be guaranteed a job with IBM and a ticket to the middle class, or even beyond”.

According to IBM’s Vice President of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, Stanley Litow, “The idea is to create a new model for science, technology, engineering, and math–areas where companies are aggressively hiring. If you look at hiring requirements, you won’t see a huge amount of difference in a lot of entry-level IT jobs.”

We look forward with great eagerness to seeing what the new school’s curriculum will look like and how well its 500-600 students, chosen by lottery will perform.

Our only concern is that the City’s lottery system will hobble the new venture by mandating that one third of its slots be filled by students performing below grade level. This will force valuable resources to be wasted on remediation and potentially introduce disruptive students into the mix who may sabotage the learning experience of their peers. Meanwhile many of the City’s truly best and brightest will loose the lottery to far less qualified applications thus throwing all of their hard work back in their faces.

This sort of short sighted attempt at enforcing statistical fairness in the name of equality of outcome can’t help but send the powerfully destructive message to students that success in life is purely a matter of luck and that working hard doesn’t pay off. After all, only one third of the slot in the new program will actually be award to students who have proven that they are ready to tackle the material and advance to college level studies. Perhaps this is way New York City Schools so often seem to be foundering on the shoals of failure.

In some respects we have done this to ourselves by recycling commonly used texts so successfully that original sales are far lower than they might otherwise be. As a result, the first student to buy one, has to pay for all of the “freeloaders” in subsequent semesters who won’t be sending any profit to the textbook publisher.

Sadly, as the high cost of textbooks and recommended readings drives more students into discarding theirs, we are producing a generation of graduates who have missed out on the opportunity to start building a personal library. Of course the content of some subjects is more transitory than others and it is understandable that a legal treaties on this year’s tax law for example will have virtually no long term value. However, in disciplines like computer science and math quite the opposite is true. Indeed, it is sometimes possible to find texts from the 1950′s like William Ross Ashby‘s Introduction to Cybernetics that do a better job of elucidating key ideas than modern sources.

If more students would hold on to their texts and start building personal libraries rather than dumping them into the used textbook market, we might be able to start a “Priced to Own” movement. Just imagine, cheaper books that you can refer to again in the future!

As to the digital editions, we are highly skeptical of schemes that only provision temporary access. If ever there was a medium suited for the long term archiving and automatic hypertextual crosslinking of material it would be the electronic textbook.

There are also fights brewing over the reimportation of textbooks sold abroad since publishers realize they can’t charge $200 to students in the developing world. Publishers fear that transshipment of vastly cheaper texts originally sold in those markets back into the US will further reduce their ability to extract the maximum revenue from each country.

Clearly, we need new economic models that optimize both revenue to publishers and textbook authors as well as the accessibility of the knowledge transmitted in those texts without forcing students who want to keep their books to unfairly subsidize everyone else in the system.

The Hacker News highlights a mix of stories ranging from hard core technology postings, patent wars on the legal front, the occasional spot to technology related political commentary, and a healthy sampling of topics related to launching high tech startups. Periodic pointers to postings with advice for students will be of particular interest to many of our readers.

Until then, the best way for students to read about Computer Science in a systematic fashion is to join The Association for Computing Machinery as a Student Member for as little as $19 for a basic membership and an extremely modest $42 to also gain access to the ACM Digital Library which will put anyone, anywhere on a par with researchers at the world’s top academic institutions in terms of their ability to explore the world’s computer science literature. ]]> http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/474/feed 0 http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/454 http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/454#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:59:53 +0000 The IEUC http://weblog.ieuc.org/?p=454 In today’s New York Post, Michael Barone offers a stinging column on “The Higher-Ed Bubble: Ready To Burst” that questions the value proposition of a college degree. The piece cites the work of the American Council of Alumni and Trustees whose whatwilltheylearn.com web site gives appallingly poor letter grades to most schools.

Reading between the lines, what is clear is that as Tuition costs have skyrocketed most schools have abandoned their traditional role of establishing a challenging core curriculum. This means that it is easer than ever for students to cheat themselves out of a quality education by taking easy classes.

For most students this comes down to a choice between facing a lot of hard work and a potentially lower GPA or having a higher GPA and a lot more free time to party. By opting for the easy path, they ultimately devalue their degree and do little to prepare themselves for the gristly reality that once in the real world they might one day need to compete with peers who tried to squeeze as much learning as possible into their college years.

Pursuing a discipline like Computer Science may seem like a lot more work but it forces a certain honesty on its disciples. A program will or won’t compile, the time and resources it uses can be measured. There are wrong answers and this a good thing.

Without timely feedback it is far too easy to delude oneself about the quality of one’s work and this is no doubt the situation faced by many institutions of higher learning today.

Sadly, pressure to maintain a high grade point average has made pursuing such course work unattractive to many students trying to game the system by minimizing the risks they take. But we suspect that college admissions committees will be most favorably impressed by those students who persevere and demonstrate their mastery of them.

Programming and Latin are also excellent compliments. While both require extended concentration and focus, Programming requires a curious hybrid of mathematical and engineering logic while the process of learning to translate and appreciate Latin mixes linguistics and oratory in a way that has a profound and lasting positive impact on one’s ability to write and persuade in English.

Fusing these critical skills enables one to tackle complex projects and bridge the gap between interpersonal and human-computer interaction. These abilities will remain relevant throughout one’s career.

Thus we encourage students, particularly, those in Middle School and the first few years of High School to give these subjects a chance.

So goes the common wisdom of many an educator. After all, it is so much more fun to make robotic dogs frolic than to do something as mundane as to write a traditional program.

But there is a real danger here, particularly in lower grades that a robotics course will either devolve into pure play or dead end in frustration turning students off to computing.

The biggest problems in teaching with real world robots are three fold.

First, it conflates programming engineering issues making it impossible to truly know if students are making a reasoning error in their code or are just encountering the unforgiving nature of physical reality. This is particularly apt to humiliate a student at a competition or demo in an environment with different ambient levels of heat, lighting, floor slipperiness, acoustic noise, physical geometry, ventilation system air flows (which can overpower the motors of a robotic blimp), the coincidental presence of target stimuli in the environment (e.g. someone wearing an electric orange T-Shirt that matches the hue of an artificial target) and radio frequency interference from other nearby projects. Any of these factors can prevent a system that worked one day from working on the next and the expertise needed to troubleshoot the resulting systems failure is apt to be beyond the keen of most instructors. Indeed, teams of graduate students have found themselves unable to ferret out the often multiple sources of such failures. So there is little doubt that most students would rapidly grow frustrated if they tried to use real robots as more than RC Cars to play with.

Second, working with tangible artifacts reduces the likelihood that students will develop the right intuitions for thinking about abstractions. Only the most disciplined instructor will be able to keep attention focused on deeper concepts like recursion and the environment model of evaluation with students chomping at the bit to make their bot do something. Instead, the path of least resistance will most likely take the form of simple imperative drag and drop tile based visual languages that will act as inverse parsers to insure that syntactically invalid programs can’t be composed in the first place. Abstraction support in such systems is usually rather limited and, aside from the now defunct Prograph data-flow oriented visual programming language, support for reflection and higher order programming constructs is all but unheard of.

The counter argument to this point is that the use of robotics grounds the curriculum in the real world and offers opportunities for students to look at the interrelationship of topics like Machine Vision, Probabilistic Reasoning, Physics Computations, Planning, and Multi-Agent System Design. (See Preparing Computer Science Students for the Robotics Revolution by David S. Touretzky – Communications of the ACM 8/2010 Vol. 53 No. 8 pp. 7-29 — N.B. an ACM Digital Library Account is required to access the ditial version of this article). The assumption here is that such topics can indeed be made accessible to students outside of graduate research labs. While this may eventually come to pass, Touretzky acknowledges that high school level robotics competitions like US FIRST “emphasize the mechanical engineering aspects of the field at the expense of computer science” and that the robots used in such programs “must be primarily teleoperated because students aren’t being taught the kind of software that would allow their robots to act autonomously.” [p. 28]

Third, there is the economic reality that robots are very expensive short lived devices whose widespread use in schools would drive up property taxes on the middle class and exacerbate the digital divide between rich and poor school districts. With prices ranging from six to sixteen hundred dollars per device, the inevitable desire to have enough robots for students to use them individually or in groups of no more than two or three, and the need to upgrade hardware every year or two to keep students competitive with their peers in other districts, the price of a robotics program could quickly skyrocket. Despite the overall downward trend in technology costs it is far more likely that successive models will offer more tech in the same price range than it is for them to offer the same tech at lower prices.

The digital divide aspect is particularly troubling since poor students will have to settle for relatively blind and deaf mobile boxes while rich students could experiment with sensor laden humanoid robots costing ten times as much.

Touretzky has demonstrated that advanced computing concepts can be integrated into a robotics programming toolkit and deployed by a world class professor at the undergraduate level, but for ordinary K – 12 End User teachers, the robotics path is fraught with danger.

Bearing these risks in mind, systems like Racket – a free scheme dialect with extensive pedagogical support and educator outreach programs – remain the best hope for promoting computing in our schools. If students still want to experiment with robots, there are a number of free hardware-optional simulations available like the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. ]]> http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/373/feed 0 http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/348 http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/348#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:38:01 +0000 The IEUC http://weblog.ieuc.org/?p=348

If you reside in Ossining, New York, or a nearby community, we would like to know if you would be interested in participating in a Summer Tech educational program. We are considering offering an Introduction to Computer Science & Programming for middle school and high school students and a survey of Comparative Programming Languages with a seminar format for students at the university level. We might also run an Interactive Fiction Workshop using the Inform 7 authoring environment to teach you how to create your own text adventure games and simulations.

These programs may be offered online in our Educational Outreach Center or we might be able to find a space to meet in person.

We are also setting up a discussion forum for River Town Webmasters, Designers, and Developers.

In any case, if you are interested in any of these offerings, please drop a note to us at: info@ieuc.org

Such concerns are not new, dating back at least as far as 1958 with Williams & Abrashkin’s publication of “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.” — which optimistically posited that programming a computer to do one’s homework would have at least as much pedagogical value as doing such work by hand.

Sadly, most students have their schedules so heavily overloaded in an attempt to woo collegiate and grad school admissions committees that they lack the time to pursue their own research interests. And even more sadly, many feel that not taking advantage of a search engine to avoid re-inventing the wheel and stashing a few key notes in their PDA to compensate for the vagaries of memory will grievously disadvantage them vis-a-vis their peers.

In short, lazy assignment and test designs that lend themselves to regurgitating stock answers invites an arms race in ways to avoid doing such ultimately pointless work. Students are not entirely wrong to view the memorization of facts or hand calculation of readily computable values to be utterly worthless skills in the modern age.

Herein lies the challenge for faculty. It is no longer acceptable to recycle past assignments of a “write a program to implement a binary search tree” or “write an essay about the Turning Test” variety. Instead we need to figure out ways to invoke today’s skill set of integrating the results of multiple discreet searches, reading and analyzing other people’s code, identifying bias and gauging the quality of others’ research.

Demands on today’s students are considerably higher than they were in previous generations as the sheer volume of human knowledge has exploded. Thus, the tools and skills that matter today have changed, as to must our approach to teaching.