Technical writing is hard
Monday, June 16th, 2008Having spent a lot of time in the last 3 years writing programming education material, I recognize just about everything said here. (The section "Writing clearly" is the interesting one.)
Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
Having spent a lot of time in the last 3 years writing programming education material, I recognize just about everything said here. (The section "Writing clearly" is the interesting one.)
Look, ma, no lesson plan
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008Just about everything I described in my talk about what goes wrong in education goes wrong at nearly every step in this 10-minute video. I don't mean to pick on this guy, but he's the top Google video result for "python tutorial", and that makes me sad. Sure, sure, I ...
Video of talk on Pigeon
Sunday, May 18th, 2008Last month at LugRadio Live USA 2008 in San Francisco, I gave a talk discussing programming education and Pigeon, my learner's programming language. Videos of all the talks at LugRadio Live are going up. Below is my talk, which you can also download. (I occasionally mumble a few key words. ...
if !johnny.canRead() then…
Monday, February 4th, 2008The state of educational programming languages. Ideally, a proper programming education would start with a thorough discussion of how data is represented as bits, followed by a brief tour of encryption, compression, information theory, data structures, search/sort algorithms, and machine architecture. Unfortunately, students are just too impatient to start their education ...
Idiots at the Gates
Sunday, November 4th, 2007In discussions of programming education, the argument is often made that learning to program shouldn't be made easier. This is the Let's Filter Out the Idiots argument, common also to the fields of law and medicine (or so I'm told). The idea, basically, is that the discipline must retain a ...
The Gettysburg 5-paragraph Essay
Friday, August 3rd, 2007There were only five known drafts of the Gettysburg Address until the recently discovered power-point version. Here now is the long lost 5-paragraph essay version: The United States is an equality nation formed eighty-seven years ago. WOOSH! BANG! KAPOW! Now we're fighting over it on this battlefield. I think we should ...
