acbart

I'll be very interested in hearing what your measures are, and how you'll account for things like employees being in a bad environment/having bad bosses. It's a complicated thing to measure.

Are you guys planning on publishing any of this material in a journal or research venue, or will you keep the results to blog posts?

I'm... actually not clear on what you're saying. Are you being sarcastic or serious? I can't read your tone and I could imagine realistic scenarios where you're saying one thing or the other.

The pursuit of novelty in research drives me crazy. You don't get published as easily with replications and tiny iterative developments. I wish they'd incentivize those kinds of research...

Intersectionality would come into play if he was arguing that he was a member of multiple minority groups. Here he was arguing that he was a contributor (not necessarily a member!) of a single group, distinct from the previously discussed ones. It's entirely possible he's a member of multiple groups, my point was just that his argument didn't reference that and it was therefore illogical.

I was amused that he defended himself by pointing out that he helps design software for a gay community. Okay, but does that really make you a minority in any way? Regardless of whether privilege is an issue in this discussion, the logic doesn't really flow here.

Technically speaking, if anyone has ever said that Blah Blah is harmful, than it has been considered harmful. The latter construction with Should Be is a more polite form, but the former is also correct if it's ever been true once.

Well, a really interesting evaluation would be to develop a pre-test/post-test for some learning objectives about what it means to understand code, and then have this be the presentation of an instructional unit. You could measure this fairly empirically and simply. Of course, you'll end up having the question - "does this teach better than something else?"

Iteration and Decision are key concepts, yes, but don't underestimate the idea of "Program State". Beginners struggle with the concept that computers have a mind that changes over a program's execution. Honestly, it's baffling to me as a teacher sometimes how to breach the subject.

#5 is a classic example of the Expression Problem[1]. Are you trying to add more shapes or more functions that operate on shapes?

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExpressionProblem

I use Skulpt for a lot of my research - I'd love to see a comparison against it in terms of speed, accuracy, etc.

I believe that, in theory, 99% of everyone can learn to code. However, some people will take prohibitively long to do so. These people may have other talents, but they will struggle in learning how to code and probably only achieve minimal success.

Of course, that's using a completely vague and arbitrary assessment of successful coding. I teach an intro coding course for non-majors at the undergraduate level. So my numbers are based on the performance assessment we use.

I teach intro CS to non-majors, and having to explain terminology is cumbersome. For instance, we call things "strings", "floats", and "dictionaries". And then I make them download Anaconda so they can get Spyder to write Python programs. I can't help but wonder what goes through their heads.

Most universities still teach a mandatory OS course where students build their own shell in C. Just because we start people off in block-based languages and python doesn't mean that Computer Scientists don't get the full tour of languages.

Out of curiosity, what's the rough outline of your curriculum?

Worth checking out: http://codespells.org/

I suppose we have fundamentally different utility functions. I think it is valuable to society to have a class of (relatively) well-off creators who do that as their full-time job. Some of these creators will even start off making mediocre works that don't contribute much, as they move from peripheral authentic participation towards the center (or drop out and get a "real job"). If you don't see that as a valuable terminal value, then we'll have to argue about that instead.

The OP here is Neil Fraser, a google employee who's done some really awesome work, including the creation of Blockly[1]. The rest of his writings and software are worth checking out.

[1] https://developers.google.com/blockly/

Bags: http://bags.cs.jmu.edu/

DBSnap: http://www.public.asu.edu/~ynsilva/dbsnap/

DataSnap: http://think.cs.vt.edu/snap/

So I see you can categorize papers, but can I tag them? Organizing my papers isn't a partitioning problem, its a tagging problem - a paper might be on several topics, and I want to get views of "e.g., all the papers on block-based languages".

I agree that there are precise definitions of the phrase "strongly typed", but from my experience if you put 10 computer scientists in the same room, you'll hear 3 different definitions of what it means.

So it's a "string contains string" function in Javascript? I mean, that's great, and this seems like a simple and clean implementation, but is it really worthy of a hacker news post? It seems like the answer to a stack overflow question.

I wouldn't mind hearing your criticisms of the interface. I use a fork of this book largely for the UI (not intentionally, that's just how things worked out). I am not a GUI-person, I just use Bootstrap as defensively as possible. So far, I haven't had any complaints about the affordances, but then most students don't complain unless things have gone terribly wrong. If you have specific things you can point to, it'd be helpful for my own purposes.

Hi, I'm a researcher using a (massive) fork of the Runestone platform. I'm pretty familiar with their technology and group. They use sphinx to generate html pages that then interact with their website through ajax. Their entire focus is on an interactive web experience for their book. Techniaclly, sphinx can export to PDF, but I doubt they've ever tried (I certainly haven't bothered in my fork), because the core functionality that we both trumpet is the interactivity.

That said: if you print individual pages with Chrome's Print to PDF feature, I think you'll be pleased with the result. The formatting tends to be very good (without extraneous markup and such, except for the interactive stuff - which was never going to go well.

I'm sure there are ways to script that printing - if not, then there aren't so many chapters that it would get excessive, I imagine. Personally, none of my students have ever requested an offline version of the book, but that might just as easily be because they never considered the utility of such a thing.

The fact that they led off with being a "Libra of Libras" immediately made me dismissive. Had to overcome a lot of bias right from the get-go.

What about GUIs that need to dynamically create and destroy components at runtime?

Do these guys have an open data for academic/research purposes?

Research says that interactive feedback is more important than static. I recommend the OpenDSA project.

http://algoviz.org/OpenDSA/

I do appreciate accessible text though - worth looking into.

The author is one of the big people in the Racket curriculum.

Does this allow Joins and Subqueries?

I suppose drill-and-practice is adequate for young learners, but boy are mathematical DaP games thick on the ground. This looks like a good implementation of one, but it's hard for me to get excited about it. Still, I'll be interested in hearing how you're testing whether it has an impact on what students know.