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


-- 




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list