On 2016-05-04 12:05 PM, John Corless wrote:
I think this is a very interesting question that I have considered. I
helped at a workshop at a local university and decided to bring my 16
year old daughter. She is an excellent science minded student, and
more or less kept up during the workshop (with extra support from
Dad!). But in the end I am not sure she got much from the experience.
I am pretty certain that she has forgotten shell, git, and R commands
and syntax since she hasn't used them since. For her, normal high
school computer use is limited to writing papers with word processors.
My hope was that she would at least know that there is such a thing as
a command line and scripts of programming languages that can be used
to analyze data. Maybe that will help her when she faces more serious
computer work later in college and beyond. So my hope was simply that
a little familiarity might breed less discomfort later in her life.
+1 to this - in order for lessons to stick, learners have to be able to
do something with the knowledge that they actually want to do, and most
high schoolers don't have a lot of legacy data to reformat or analyze.
This is one of the reasons why the "media first" approach pioneered by
Guzdial and Ericson is so effective: pretty much everybody has a use for
fiddling with pictures. (I'm still frequently tempted to re-do our
intro Python lesson around image manipulation, but that's a topic for
another day...)
Thanks,
Greg
--
Dr Greg Wilson
Director of Instructor Training
Software Carpentry Foundation
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
Discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
