Computers in school

G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl
Mon Aug 6 19:10:29 UTC 2001


I think it is a little more complicated:

1. Hobby or professional?

Hardly any professional can imagine how to do his/her job without a good
computer.
Mastering computerprograms as tools and integrating them efficently in a
professional setting is more and more part of the new professional skills
and lot of companies earn money to teach these skills...

If you use a computer for fun it becomes one of these time consuming
childisch games like Fishing, Hunting, Football. In these settings it is the
user who sets his own targets and rewards: these differ from person to
person. Reading a manual is cheating, first making a plan makes it look like
work etc..
  
2. Tool or Toy?

Some people want to realize things with computers, nice and quick: they
(for)sees the results and hate these clumsy machines, which never do what
you WANT them to do, spoiling your valuable time.. Hit Return, You can count
on that!!

If you see it as a toy, it is part of the game: who wants to solve to easy
puzzles?
(If I go to the internet in freetime, a wonder about all these things You
can find on the internet for free, but looking for information about a
product and finding a place in the neigbourhood where I can buy it makes me
- on that moment - more and more a computer-hater..

More women are (thought to be?) users, more men still want to play games?

3. What is the use? 
What is the sense of learning computer-programming-skills? Do you become
isolated when you cannot write programs? In the Eighties some people wrote
books about that, nowadays more people say that these machines should be
more user-friendly, hidden in everyday life: Programming is for nerds and
other fossiles, less and less secundary school-children choose for technical
skills, boys too.
(Teaching students more abstract thinking skills by the tool "programming",
so not programming as goal itself, did even disappear from the educational
front.) 

4. Time is money, so can you proof that it pays off if you theach children
programming instead of, yes instead of what?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Guzdial [mailto:guzdial at cc.gatech.edu]
> Sent: maandag 6 augustus 2001 19:43
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: Computers in school
> 
> 
> >
> >I like Alan's quote very much (it is on my website -
> >http://www.toontalk.com/English/adultask.htm ). My question 
> is why after 17
> >years do so few people understand that that is what is so 
> special about
> >computer programming. Why are there so few actively trying 
> to spread the
> >power and joy of programming to the wider world?  Why is it 
> such a hard
> >sell?
> 
> In my opinion, Ken, the answer to that question has got to be on the 
> level of a Grand Challenge.  Why is programming so hard?  (And 
> similarly: Why are so many willing to move kids towards computers as 
> appliances but not as media?)
> 
> At GaTech, we recently started a bunch of assessments of our students 
> and found that even 40% of our 2nd Semester students couldn't write a 
> dozen lines of Java code (insert and delete of a linked list) when 
> given the class definition and method headers, a compiler they knew, 
> and 90 minutes.  I've mentioned these assessments on this list 
> previously.
> 
> Over last Spring, a group of us did a similar study at GaTech, 
> another US institution, one in the UK, and one in Poland.  The 
> problem was building an RPN or infix calculator (different problems 
> with different data sets).  We did our meta-analyses last month. End 
> result: Average grade was 25%.  (This'll be appearing in the ACM 
> SIGCSE Bulletin soon.)
> 
> What's amazing is how few people are studying this.  At a time when 
> so many (e.g., the PCAST report) point to the importance of 
> information technology and education about it for the health of the 
> economy, research into CS Education has virtually disappeared.  The 
> last Empirical Studies of Programmers workshop was cancelled due to 
> lack of submissions!
> 
> I think that we have clues about why it's so hard for so many, and 
> how to make it easier.  Amy Bruckman showed that making programming 
> socially cool (in Moose Crossing) made it possible for lots of kids 
> to learn to program. The recent American Association of University 
> Women report pointed out that women (and many others, I'll bet) are 
> drawn away from IT because we make CS classes as boring as possible. 
> Motivation is important, and showing that computers can do 
> interesting and creative things is critical to making programming 
> learnable.  The Squeak tile approach of using multiple parallel 
> scripts (similar to the approaches in Logo Mindstorms and StarLogo) 
> to avoid explicit conditionals or iteration is a fascinating 
> direction to explore.
> 
> Seymour Papert has written that it's inherent in school's structure 
> to avoid revolution, and that programming will never become 
> integrated into school curricula because of that (ref: Journal of the 
> Learning Sciences article last year, and in the Children's Machine 
> and Connected Family books).  I hope he's wrong, but I think the 
> small number of people pushing on this problem makes it more likely 
> that he'll be right.
> 
> Mark
> 
> --------------------------
> Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, 
> GA 30332-0280
> Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
> Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
> (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
> http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html
> 
> 




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