On 02/26/2012 07:18 PM, Geoff Canyon wrote:
We're wandering a bit here, but I disagree completely, so of course I
should reply ;-)
I'm not sure whether we are wandering, as there is some sort of malaise
among young people
if they think that knowing how to create emoticons in Facebook
constitutes IT.
What does have to be hammered out, Geoff, is probably some position
midway between yours and
mine. There is a general disquiet about the way "Computers and IT"
courses have gone, and
it might not be a bad idea if those of us who are actually engaged in
both programming and education
got involved in the dialogue.
As I have day-to-day contact with 7-15 year olds who use computers all
the time, but understand
little or nothing about them, and yet talk "big" about how knowledgeable
about them they are;
but when "push comes to shove" cannot do anything beyond typing essays
in 'Office', f*rt around
on Facebook, talk to each other with Skype, and muck around with
Youtube, I find myself
troubled.
Some 100 years ago, it was considered necessary to memorize log tables.
That skill is now useless.
I remember (near 50 here as well) learning how to derive a square root.
Wow; your education was even more conservative than mine . . . :)
That skill is also useless.
Yes, those skills are useless; but a nodding acquaintance with the
underpinnings of mathematics, and, for the sake of argument, what
logarithms are and why they were used in the past is not useless.
Unless, like Henry Ford you feel a bit anti History.
I agree with you that "It is far more IMPORTANT that kids learn to think
logically and coherently," but that doesn't at all mean that they learn a
particular file structure, or machine UI.
Well, frankly, I do wonder how on earth a 12 year old can see his/her
way through
a set of embedded if . . . end if / for . . . next loops (subroutines)
if they have not been
taught any basic thinking skills. As, here in Bulgaria, "education" is
99% fact-cramming,
the country is going to continue with its critical skills shortage for ever.
Kids today don't need to know
what a command line is because the vast majority of them will never see one
in their lives.
Really? I wonder about that. Surely every potential computer programmer
should
have some sort of understanding of command lines. This is rather like
saying that
that children brought up in cities should have no understanding that
animals are slaughtered
so that they can have meat on their plates, because they will never see
a slaughter-house.
[Funnily enough, I took my 2 boys, when the older one was 6, down to the
market in Al_Ain, UAE,
to see the goats and the cows having their throats cut, for exactly the
same reason as I taught them
some simple command-line stuff on an old PC running FreeDOS].
Kids should learn how to think, but in the context of the
environment they are/will operate in.
Which may change at any moment; so the more things they are exposed to
the better
chance they have to adapt to whatever circumstances present themselves.
A calculator is no more a crutch than
is an automobile.
A slide-rule helps children (and adults!) visualise numbers and their
relations to one another;
a calculator does not.
People who drive (or fly) from New York to Los Angeles
should not be first required to learn how to drive a horse and wagon across
the country.
No, of course they shouldn't because there is nothing to be learned
about the underpinnings of how
cars or aeroplanes work from going by horse.
But using a GUI-less computer does help a child to understand the
numerical underpinnings of
how computers work; a fact all to often obscured by WIMP-GUI eye-candy.
The WYSIWYG interface is all well and good; but you and I know full well
that underneath all
the buttons, fields, images and what-have-you in the Livecode interface
there are a bunch of scripts
that have been written in plain-vanilla code that have demanded quite a
bit of boring slog and hard thinking;
and I, for one, would have found that one hell of a lot more difficult
if I had been under the illusion that
Livecode was just some sort of drag-N-drop LEGO kit that would magically
make programs to do all the extremely
fancy things that can be done.
One of the most disingenuous claims is that computer programming is
easy; no it's not, and it takes a long
time to get one's head round things and to become good at it. While it
is easy to make "powerpoint"
slideshows, it is not easy to do much more.
On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 2:15 AM, Richmond<richmondmathew...@gmail.com>wrote:
Speaking as a reactionary 50 year old; I think:
1. No child under the age of 14 should be allowed any mathematical crutch
apart from a slide-rule.
I find, in my "EFL" school, that kids find sliderules rather interesting,
and they are able to SEE how numbers
work; something one cannot do with a pocket calculator.
2. At 14 children should all be given something like a Pentium 2 with
FreeDOS and taught
how to navigate themselves around a system with no GUI.
3. At 14 children should be given a course in something like BASIC or LISP
on that GUI-less computer.
3.1. Probably preceded by a few weeks "doing programming" on paper, and
messing around with buttons in cups.
4. At 17-18 children should all be given a PC with an operating system
with a WIMP-GUI on it after
they have passed a test to demonstrate their familiarity with a
Terminal emulator.
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