[Edu-sig] Feb 24 cs-in-math Elluminate meeting (Math 2.0)

[kirby urner]

I briefly blogged about our meeting last night.

http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2010/02/learning-on-line.html

I posted Ed Cherlin's Chinese + Arabic sig as a test of the unicode
interface, even though he couldn't find Elluminate for his distro, so
had to bail.

Maria D. did a good job of hosting, and we were graced with the
presence of one of the Great Lambda heavyweights, Peter Henderson.

http://www.math-in-cs.org/

The Great Lambda worshipers are a tribe to our north, inherit through
LISP, LOGO and Scheme, although that middle language donated its
turtle to the OO camp, also working in Ruby right?

http://www.rubyquiz.com/quiz104.html
http://blog.notahat.com/posts/4

Re:  "Great Lambda worshipers":  talking about the functional
programming camp, not wanting to pollute thinking like a mathematician
with the "mutable variables" of the computer scientists.

Python has "little lambda" (a token lambda).

We seemed pretty much in agreement during this meeting that Computer
Science is going away as a high school discipline, leaving only
Mathematics (cite:  death of CS AP test, only a pale shadow of its
former self).

The only question seems to be whether folding CS into Math means
keeping some programming, or going with the New Zealand unplugged
route (CS on paper).

I'm not sure even New Zealand is going the NZ unplugged route.  Nat
Torkington has a say:

http://nathan.torkington.com/

Lets see how students "vote with their feet" on that one, i.e. it's
not entirely up to the teachers.

Kirby