[Edu-sig] More thoughts on CP4E

[Kirby Urner]

> = Joan
  = Kirby

>The reality of it is, the grandkids are teaching the 
>grandparents who WEREN'T techies, how to do things 
>like make web sites, fiddle the graphics, etc.  
>THese are things the kids have figured out how to 
>do on their own.  

Yes, very true, this happens as well.  

Either way, a lot of new skills and abilities
are seeping into kid culture, even if regular 
schooling is not the source.

I used to quote a kid's website about rotation
matrices.  He put it up for peers interested in
writing computer games.  "They don't teach this
in high school much, so we'll just have to teach
each other" was his drift.

>The web has to serve as the missing techie 
>grandma, as has already been pointed out here 
>by others, for kids who don't have someone around 
>to show them how to program.  

If they've got the web, yes.

>The professional programming world has pretty much 
>adopted the idea of one-on-one mentoring of beginners.  

Is that so?  I wasn't aware of that.  One-on-one 
is great when you can get it (or can be -- you
might get paired with someone incompatible), but
one-to-many is the more usual mode, at least in
the early stages of a discipline.

>Unfortunately, any model of CP4E that relies on 
>one-to-one skills transfers is setting itself up 
>for failure.  

Agreed.

>You could get a lot of people involved by having 
>a volunteer in a local public library at night 
>even one or two nights a month to answer questions 
>that the parents or other involved adults can't 
>answer.  You have to publicize it widely.  Or 
>have an online equivalent.    The Educational 
>Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) at Stanford has 
>an online classroom that works really well.  That 
>same model could work for teaching programming 
>on a one-to-many basis.  
>
>Joan

These are good suggestions.  Our Computer Center at
Princeton did free classes (this was 1976-1980 for
me, dunno if it's still like that today), and people 
from the community could just come learn.  It really 
helps to have the right set-up, i.e. a projected 
monitor so the presenter can show stuff, including 
alpha-numeric, in big type.

My view is that if you plan to pen kids inside an
institution for 12 years (called a "school"), you
should plan to make at least some computer programming 
a part of everyone's experience, and not just as 
some special "advance subject" off in a corner.  
Math class looks like a logical place to phase it 
in.  Right now, they're using calculators a lot 
in math class, but I think that's an artificially 
limiting approach.

But as Matthius points out, this is a really difficult 
idea to get across.  Given the slowness of the text 
book upgrade cycle, innovations of this kind take 
maybe 20 years to implement, or more.

And it's even worse than that.  We have innovations
having to do with polyhedra and sphere packing, 
that could make spatial geometry a whole lot more 
accessible and relevant to students.  It's already 
been 20 years on those.  Still no change.

When I was I kid, Sputnik happened and that shook 
things up some.  People were willing to try new 
things, to acknowledge that the curriculum was 
falling behind, needed to be suffused with new 
ideas.  I'm not sure what the next Sputnik will be.  
Seems educators are pretty complacent about the 
status quo these days.  Or maybe that's just my 
biased perspective.

Kirby