On 2/7/07, David Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <<snip>>
All a number of us are saying is that one size does not fit all. I
suspect what you do works well for the students you teach, but it may not work well for other groups of students. That's what keeps teaching fresh for me - I adjust what I'm doing until I see that the students are getting it. That's why I like teaching at a small school with relatively small classes (20-30 students typically). I can get immediate feedback from a good percentage of the students and determine if I need to try a different technique for explaining the topic. That's next to impossible if you have a classroom of more than 50 students. Dave
My 8th grade PPS class @ Winterhaven involved no pre-screening as to math skills, but neither was it as math-intensive as my Saturday Academy classes, which require no pre-reqs other than algebra, but *do* assume motivated students willing to give up Saturdays to do something geeky. In both groups, some are precocious, others more average in terms of skill. My goal as a teacher is to impart enough skills to make some kind of self steering investigation possible, i.e. they get lectures, but also a lot of "try stuff" time, with me walking around and helping. We use such as stickworks.py, and/or the native VPython API, in addition to core Python. As many have noted here, students love graphics, and when it comes to bang for the buck, I find VPython vastly more motivational than a Tk canvas. I agree with the late Arthur Siegel that VPython is critical to Python's competitive advantage. Ruby is very OpenGL aware, right out the box, and will likely supersede Python in many educational arenas if VPython, or packages of similar capability, are allowed to lie fallow. I understand why he wanted VPython added to the Standard Library. On the other hand, the Standard Library is something of a graveyard/junkyward as well. Anyway, the feedback I'm getting is that the pipeline whereby new geeks get born and nurtured through to a professional real world career (doesn't mean in computer science necessarily) is severely broken right now except in a few relatively utopian settings. The CS faculties tend to blame HS experience, as so many students are already turned off and/or ready only for remedial numeracy courses by the time they enter college. CS0 courses, rather than serving an exciting recruiting function, may serve to further dull the material, turning off even more students (especially the most curious). One prof at a recent Willamette U. panel on this: "whatever you're doing in high school, please stop it" (except he didn't say please). What I call (he's too modest to call it that) "the Mark Shuttleworth Pipeline" (which you've been reading about over the last year, if you've been reading my posts) assumes only a normal average healthy curiosity, not any kind of special genius. A lot of students in South Africa are in open revolt against a "business as usual" education, when it comes to developing their analytical (problem solving) skills. They know, from being close to the bottom of TIMMS, that their only hope of participating as equals in the emerging global high tech economy is in "leap frogging," more than simply imitating. A lot of other countries feel the same way. My investments in screencasting and mathcasting companies (including my own 4D Studios) are in alignment with the peer teaching and home teaching models. CS0 *could* be a helpful puzzle piece, but in many cases it's merely a backwater, something to bypass because too dumbed down, just like the USA's K-12 more generally. I probably sound like a militant compared to most college professors, but I assure you many of my private sector collegues are far more polemical than I, when it comes to pointing out shortcomings in the current curriculum. Kirby
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