Computers in school
Alan Kay
Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Tue Aug 7 18:23:03 UTC 2001
Mark --
I generally agree -- but it's not clear that great SAT scores mean
much when it comes to assessing actual thinking skills ... (nor per
se whether a person can program, come to think of it).
Cheers,
Alan
------
At 12:52 PM -0400 8/7/01, Mark Guzdial wrote:
>>From inference and by observation of the demographics of every
>>programming lab I have ever seen, how does this
>>statement explain why causcasian, indian, oriental males do not
>>reject CS majors if boredom is the only issue.
>>
>>Education is not supposed to be a rock concert.
>>
>
>Please note my earlier posting: Studies across schools and countries
>are suggesting that a LARGE percentage of students who are
>successfully passing intro courses are NOT actually learning to
>program.
>
>The second observation is that introductory courses typically have
>enormous drop-out and failure rates. 10-30% is not uncommon. Great
>that some people are succeeding. That so many are NOT is a problem.
>
>What would you think of a manufacturing process that threw away
>10-30% of its input raw material? Georgia Tech brags about having
>highest average SAT scores of incoming freshmen of any public
>university in the US. Our "input" is terrific. If most of these
>students are not learning to program, then something's wrong with
>how we're teaching programming. The multi-university, multi-country
>study I mentioned earlier (led by Mike McCracken) showed that it's
>not just us. Therefore, I suggest that there's a problem. I cite
>the AAUW study as one lead toward a solution.
>
>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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