On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 8:23 PM, Charles <cco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Any place for PDX Guild to expand operations and benefit from that? They > deserve it, and in a just world they should get a piece of that action. > They are the pioneers of the code school phenomenon. > I sent them a copy of my article, and at one time we had some high schoolers stopping in on Mondays, refugees from a system that wasn't up to teaching what they wanted to learn, shades of South Africa. https://flic.kr/p/GijkVp (high school refugee) However, my impression is most code schools are currently locked into this model of taking unemployed folks, perhaps with injuries that keep them from doing their earlier work, and trying to turn them into "full stack developers" in about 9-12 weeks, plus or minus. That's a laudable goal, but somewhat different from teaching the "three Rs" as I'm proposing. Probably when I set up my network of Quaker-run boarding schools, I'll be using code schools (what I've learned from them) as a template, but I'll skip the "boot camp" model or call it something else. > > Does Javascript only enter after rung 3, i.e. through Codesters it's all > Python, then port as webapp to "the cloud"? That Bingo game I was > referring to, I started in Python and used Pillow to generate the Bingo > card images at first. But early-on I went through the remainder of the > process that would be necessary in order to have usable cards by morning > and realized that I needed to be copying images from my browser into Google > Docs, then export as PDF and take to Kinko's in the morning. So I ported > it to Javascript right there and could have bypassed the Python prototype > stage. This happens all the time to me, i.e. Javascript does things that > only Python could do before, and I opt for Javascript. I think Javascript > should be taught early, perhaps even first. I would have never said such a > thing a few years ago. > > There's no concept of Web Dev prior to Cloud9, which is where JS + HTML + CSS comes in, using Codepen (in addition to C9). Here's the picture I drew for parents that dropped in today, final day of Winter term: https://flic.kr/p/Tc11Aa That's a swimming pole with two diving boards, a low one (MIT Scratch) and a higher one (Codesters). The low one is familiar, close to game-like, whereas the "high dive" (Codesters) is somewhat scarier (more a bridge to somewhere else). They're analogous however. In a given session, they might do one high divey task, two low hanging fruit, and play the rest of the time. Even the play teaches skills. Once they've mastered these two development environments (Scratch and Codesters), they're ready to tackle web development. JavaScript + HTML + CSS (+ SVG?) all come into the picture as an integrated whole, thanks to Codepen in particular. I know there's a lot of interest in JavaScript as the only programming language one needs. The so-called MEAN stack and all that. However, JavaScript is a moving target with all those trans-pilers and TypeScript / CoffeeScript type dialects, with ES5, ES6, ES7... really quite messy, a moving target. My attitude is learning Python will give you entre and then JavaScript will seem somewhat familiar, especially the newer versions which have a class construct more like Python's. > >> Parents / guardians pay extra to have their students dabble in this >> parallel extra-curricular track, however the high schools appear to be >> absorbing a lot of this material and incorporating it natively. >> >> If they pioneer what I call a "lambda calculus track" [1] featuring more >> of what we used to think of as vocational topics ("shop"), then there's no >> reason to depend on outsiders for this content. >> > > You're talking HS here, but also code schools ... do any code schools get > into either of the 2 math tracks you describe? If no, then that's a big > difference between the two forms of code school. > Code schools will do data science and machine learning on the side, which both feature big data. These are the buzzwords of the moment. My lambda track includes a fair amount of crypto, and that's featured today when they study HTTPS, RSA and hashlib type algorithms. SHA-1 recently cracked and blah blah. I'd consider code schools somewhere between high schools and college, in terms of the topics they cover, and the number of weeks / months / years they take to master (vs. cover). Given the pressure to get a job and to become a "full stack developer" as soon as possible, there's not much time for straying too far off that beaten track in the standard model. The code schools I envision teach classes in 3D printing, making art, doing various kinds of math and science, without having to prove these are what "full stack developers" need. I'd like to not care about the full stack developer track so exclusively. One goes to code school for other reasons, such as to improve one's high school math teaching abilities. Jupyter Notebooks are a great example. A company our school could use those in-house, to share curriculum, but getting a math teacher up to speed with JN technology is a rather different pathway than training a full stack developer. A code school needs multiple pathways. We had that at OST. I'd like code schools to freely focus on serving a wider clientele, I guess I'm saying. Many companies already do this (e.g. LearningTree) and are among the code schools I consider successful. Portland has a lot of talented people who would gladly teach 4-5 day classes in something esoteric (e.g. Regular Expressions, Haskell, Pyret...) but would never commit to teaching a boot camp for full stack developers. I'd like to set up the school to offer paying gigs to individuals on a temporary basis. We'd have a large talent pool of willing faculty. Pretty much all 1099s and no W2s if you wanna talk turkey in IRS terms (contractors not employees). Lots more people get to add "taught code school" to their resumes that way too. > >> We often work with the full time teachers coming in and out of the room >> (it's their room), observing what we're up to, mentally taking notes. >> Portland Public Schools (PPS) is already well aware of the MIT Scratch >> option and uses it internally. I expect they're looking at Codesters more, >> thanks to Coding with Kids. >> > > Oh to live in a tech hub ... > >> >> MIT Scratch is good with music, relative to Codesters. Here's something >> I wrote to the parents last week (fixed a typo): >> > > I played with HTML5 MIDI ... in Jython I used to use the Java MIDI API, > and the associated sound engines. In HTML5 the best I could determine was > that you have to write your own synth ... I hope I'm wrong, or that an > alternative comes along. I just want a piano sound via the HTML5 MIDI > API. Any suggestions? > Nope, maybe someone will chime in. I'm on the csound listserv, csound being a full featured music synth system, open source, but hard to use and develop in. I don't think it uses HTML5 API but I could be wrong (I'm no expert). I'm happy enough just using MIT Scratch at the moment, for anything musical. My demo app shows the notes changing on the keyboard, as it plays, and the code makes it clear how that happens. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/149963280/ I'm a big believer in "two languages is more than twice as good as knowing one" because when we compare and contrast, see similarities and differences, we get that "stereo" view. For example, when a Windows user, I'd go over to Linux for awhile and study hard, then come back to Windows really understanding Windows better too. When you use more than one operating system, you start to get "what's on OS" (I'd also used mainframes and minis, before hobbyist boxes went viral) When you know more bases than 10, you for the first time start to get "what's a base". [ For this reason I have only derision for the US Common Core standards which mandate "base 10 only". When I saw that I knew for certain these standards were not written by anyone with much computing experience. Fortunately I squeaked through elementary school when New Math was at its apex and got it about "number bases" as early as 2nd grade, unbelievable by today's retrograde / degenerate standards. When that New Math song by Tom Lehrer came out, I was just learning addition, and when he made fun of the base 8 version, I said "what's wrong, I did everything right?" which made the adults in the room laugh even harder ] Anyway, I'm excited by the prospect of teaching / learning Python and JavaScript in an overlapping manner. Here's a Jupyter Notebook on that topic: http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/Python5/blob/master/Comparing%20JavaScript%20with%20Python.ipynb > Thanks again. Your kids are a joy and really seem to have a good time >>> being friendly and helpful to one another, very important in the coding >>> world. >>> >>> Coding is both a solitary quiet activity, and an intensely social one. >>> The logins and passwords we give them work on other computers, for example >>> at home. Let me know if you have any questions about that. However no >>> homework is required. >>> >> Sounds like a great job! > I'm learning a lot. For me it's about ethnography and understanding my ambient culture better. The kids showed me some of the games they play (the "swimming pool" in the model), like Animal Jam (National Geographic) or whatever. Eye opening. These kids are very sociable, not mean to each other. They're also well able to concentrate, solve puzzles. That's true in both troupes I'm working with. Maybe I just got lucky. Kirby
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