Hacker News Reader

So, I agree with you at some level -- people who think they want to major in CS should be hit with the real thing ASAP, just as aspiring chemists get hit with Organic Chem and aspiring physicists get hit with the wave equation.

But:

Where is the fun and easy intro to BioChem course so that we can entice more people to become doctors?

Nobody dies when a literature major builds a PHP website in their spare time, or hacks together an iPhone app.

Moreover, there are fun and easy intro medical courses: They're called first aid courses, and everyone should probably take one.

Lots of majors have an intro class that emphasizes fun and higher-level perspective at the expense of the details. They often have demeaning nicknames ("Rocks for Jocks", "Physics for Poets"), which is unfortunate, because I'd far rather see people have one superficial course in a subject than know nothing about it at all.

"I'd far rather see people have one superficial course in a subject than know nothing about it at all."

This is called high school.

High schools can be arbitrarily bad, and so it's customary for most colleges to have remedial courses, like Physics for Poets, for those students coming from high schools that didn't provide that.

Why should such a student be admitted to college?

It's not a student's fault if their high school is arbitrarily bad. You can sometimes tell that a student is smart and their high school sucked. Such students tend to get even smarter than you thought they were once they get to college.

There were not nearly enough teachers in my high school to even teach all the intro level courses I could have taken in college.

Your high school had a linguistics department? A geologist on staff? An economics teacher? A statistics teacher? A biochemist? An anthropologist? A sociologist? A sign language instructor? An oenologist? [1]

My high school didn't even teach calculus at the time. [2] And I was lucky that they had even had, e.g., a physics teacher who could actually teach physics. [3] Many do not. I know this because if you mention physics to a random college student they will generally tell you stories about their clueless high school physics teacher and how that teacher made them hate physics forever. ;)

---

[1] "Oenology for Poets", though it did not go by that name -- it was colloquially called "the Wines course" -- was the runaway favorite of all the intro courses at Cornell:

http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/facultybios/facu...

Needless to say, my US high school did not offer lectures on wines. I wonder if the situation is different in France or Germany. ;)

[2] Not that it mattered; My math teacher helped me convince the school to let me take math at the local university instead.

[3] Not that it mattered; My physics teacher was clueful enough to take me aside on day one, give me a copy of PSSC Physics and tell me that when I got bored I should read this book. I was a very lucky high school student to have such clueful teachers.

"Where is the fun and easy intro to BioChem course so that we can entice more people to become doctors?"

You wrote it tongue-in-cheek but I would honestly be interested in such a course. Many (most?) students enter college without a clear course of study in mind, and while the sciences and math require more work and discipline than, say, the much maligned English degree, that doesn't mean that the introductory coursework must be so dry and tedious as to scare away all but the most ardent students. If we want to encourage more people to get technical degrees, some "fun" courses could be a good tool.

I took such a course. It was called Bioterrorism and I took it at RPI while getting my Computer Science and Philosophy degree.

The course was mostly writing and discussions, with a lot of high-level talk about things like the factors (biological, chemical and social) that allow different diseases and ailments move, etc. Stuff like that. Quite fascinating, but not too technical.

It certainly lead me to buy more biology books. In fact, due to that course, two of my favorite books were written by biologists. Had I taken the class earlier, I might have become a biologist.

>Where is the fun and easy intro to BioChem course so that we can entice more people to become doctors? How about an "Intro to Medicine" where we do fun stuff like play Operation and dress up in scrubs?

Maybe more people would remember their high school biology classes if this were slightly the case. Instead, the gen-ed level courses are more like weeding-out courses, and many simply flat-out forget everything because it was such a horrible experience.

My university had 6 month prep courses in math and science for people who wanted math or science degrees, but didn't have the pre-requisite grades or had been out of high school for so long they'd forgotten it all. The course basically covers the last year and a half of high school and the first of half the first 'real' university level courses. If you passed the prep course they'd let you in. Surely you could do something like the for CS as well.

> Where is the fun and easy intro to BioChem course so that we can entice more people to become doctors?

We have that: every medical drama on TV, Patch Adams, Awakenings, etc. Not to mention the massive cultural esteem associated with the medical profession.

> How about an "Intro to Medicine" where we do fun stuff like play Operation and dress up in scrubs?

Playing Operation and dressing up in scrubs is intro to medicine. By the time you're in high school, you have a mental image of what a doctor does and roughly what the job entails.

Most people on Earth have zero concept of what programmers do. I've had family members literally ask me if I type ones and zeroes all day. (A: yes. You should have seen their eyes.) People know that we sit in front of a computer. Beyond that... nothing. They don't have any of what's on screen much less what's in our heads. With mathematicians people at least think about whiteboards and equations.

So, yeah, I don't see any harm in a little "Hey, here's a fun intro to what programming is."

Sorry, OT, but this was in fact almost my exact experience with military recruiters. I signed papers with the Marines on the spot.

And I don't know about honest and effective, but it does I think target a specific type of person.