Hacking Education | Hacker News Reader

Hacking Education

unionsquareventures.com

22 pointsmessel13 comments

Here's a question for you guys: If there was an easy platform to teach others, do you think there would be enough collective interest in putting together lessons/courses on programming?

We at www.nixty.com are building out this platform and there are obvious areas where there will be pick up (homeschooling, skill development [ie., photoshop] etc.), but for a while now I've been wondering if hackers would actually collaborate and create a sort of Hackers U.

There is a guy who frequently posts/links on HN to different lessons on learning python and other languages. I think that is great, so it is nice to see some initial movement in this area.

I think that's the idea behind answers.com ask.com and instructables.com and wikipedia. People have a lot of free time, hackers included. I think a central hub where senior hackers can teach younger hackers is a noble and profitable idea.

So receiving content for free will be the easy part.

The hard part will be sorting through the 50 entries for how to start programming in Python and the 5000 entries for best text editors to use.

Yes, there definitely has to be an integral community moderated system, so that the best content rises.

incidentally, isn't that Joel Spolsky's Stack Overflow?? Although the emphasis on SO is answering questions, as opposed to instruction material on how to learn a certain technology.

I love the idea of interactive learning (between students), after getting a lecture+project broadcast. Syntax is a killer for new programs, things just don't work and weird errors sprout up (newer languages have fantastic IDEs to minimize this impact).

Ideally it'd be groovy if teachers could get paid to build some functional (simple?) tools with their classes. Students could learn and produce at the same time, but in a limited/structured way. Professors do this type of research with grad students all the time. Companies do this type of thing with new employees all the time (mentor + noobs).

Brings back memories of my first college coding project. Getting true basic to identify harmonics within a metal rod, and displaying info about the structure (thanks to Bjorn Einerson for doing the heavy lifting that weekend). About the same time I was cursing (syntax) at my green and back CRT in the main library while coding up a simple 6 node neural net in C (backpropagation).

What would this offer that isn't already freely available on e.g. iTunes U?

It'd be a lot more structured like a course that you could work through. Lessons that would walk you through each part of a learning module. One lesson might consist of a video (from iTunes, Standford, or MIT lecture), test with feedback, discussion area (like HN) where questions are asked and answered etc. There would be a series of lessons like this that would contextualize some of the free stuff out there and also provide peer to peer learning.

Oh, so you're talking about actually having teachers/mentors? That would be great, but (as a CS TA) it's very time consuming and...well, I wish you the best of luck in finding enough people with time to teach.

For what it's worth, Squidoo is about to release a feature which makes it very easy to create the kind of lens that Brad links to at the top of the post. So far I've made lenses like this on three conferences by hand:

http://www.squidoo.com/hacking_education

http://www.squidoo.com/the99percent

http://www.squidoo.com/blogwell-ny-2009

They each took 3+ hours, but with the new module it should be quick and easy. The conference organizers love these things, so once the new module launches if there are any conferences you want to go to then let me know and I'll try to get you in for free if you agree to make one for them. I think we'll run it like wikinews where you have to make one or two good quality ones and then we'll give you a press pass. (I still need to run this by the Squidoo staff again, so no promises, but I'll try.)

Of course you won't be able to submit them to the HN queue because Squidoo lenses are still banned, but such is life.

A real education involves playful tinkering. The example of the AMV creator brings this to like. Also, I really only grokked Assembly Language after I discovered Core Wars.

Thanks for introducing me to Core Wars! Always wanted to learn assembly, so an abstracted version in a game format is exactly what I need to get started!

Any such initiatives for Lisp.....?

Look up Koza's work with Genetic Algorithms. There are lots of little "game worlds" about the same complexity as Core Wars.

Here is the related post from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607234

Reply on news.ycombinator.com