Teaching Computer Science without Computers
January 8, 2011 7:54 AM Subscribe
Tim Bell teaches computer science to kids without using a computer. CS Unplugged has lots of resources for you to do this on your own. [via reddit]
This is how CS was taught, at least at the high school level, in the 80s in most Canadian schools. Time-sharing was possible but time-costly and hard to access, and local micros still a budgetary dream.
I was taught basic machine coding (shifts, adds, copies, &etc.) on a 4-bit paper computer the instructor reused year after year. We also learned a stripped-down Pascal on another paper computer.
The next year we got a room full of Apple something-or-others and switched to some sort of compiled BASIC, but not before I got an obligatory semester of COBOL.
Good times.
posted by clvrmnky at 11:15 AM on January 8, 2011 [1 favorite]
I was taught basic machine coding (shifts, adds, copies, &etc.) on a 4-bit paper computer the instructor reused year after year. We also learned a stripped-down Pascal on another paper computer.
The next year we got a room full of Apple something-or-others and switched to some sort of compiled BASIC, but not before I got an obligatory semester of COBOL.
Good times.
posted by clvrmnky at 11:15 AM on January 8, 2011 [1 favorite]
Hey! I studied under that guy - he was one of the best lecturers I had. The enthusiasm he shows for teaching computer science really came through then as well.
Weird - he doesn't look as if he's really aged at all in the intervening 15ish years.
posted by wilberforce at 11:48 AM on January 8, 2011
Weird - he doesn't look as if he's really aged at all in the intervening 15ish years.
posted by wilberforce at 11:48 AM on January 8, 2011
This is great. I regularly spend weeks "teaching google" to kids both here in the US and abroad without touching ever touching a computer.
It's a philosophic approach with strong elements of linguistics.
When they do get to a computer and do begin "to google", they are very often marvelous.
posted by Mike Mongo at 12:45 PM on January 8, 2011 [1 favorite]
It's a philosophic approach with strong elements of linguistics.
When they do get to a computer and do begin "to google", they are very often marvelous.
posted by Mike Mongo at 12:45 PM on January 8, 2011 [1 favorite]
PS great post!
posted by Mike Mongo at 12:54 PM on January 8, 2011
posted by Mike Mongo at 12:54 PM on January 8, 2011
[...] but not before I got an obligatory semester of COBOL.
Good times.
ERROR, DOES NOT COMPUTE.
posted by JHarris at 1:35 PM on January 8, 2011
Good times.
ERROR, DOES NOT COMPUTE.
posted by JHarris at 1:35 PM on January 8, 2011
Mike Mongo, not to derail, but do you have any materials that you recommend to teach kids to google well?
posted by zangpo at 2:08 PM on January 8, 2011
posted by zangpo at 2:08 PM on January 8, 2011
I highly recommend "CS Unplugged". I used some of his lessons as a Teaching Fellow during a recent stint in grad school. I especially remember the finite automata lesson, in which kids traveled between various islands based on input. Still makes me smile to think about it. The sorting algorithms and binary numbers lessons were also fun.
posted by grimjeer at 4:57 PM on January 8, 2011
posted by grimjeer at 4:57 PM on January 8, 2011
So when I was in high school, back in the days when the Apple ][ ruled the education scene, there were only so many computers to go around. When I took a computer course, I got unlucky, and ended up in a section that was being taught without hands-on access.
This proved to be a problem when we were being taught about READ and DATA. The textbook had a little program along these lines:
10 dim a(10)
20 for i=1 to 10:read a(i):next
30 for i=i to 10:print a(i): next
40 data 8,6,7,9,10,3,4,1,2,5
(probably written more verbosely)
And the question, what would the results of this program be?
The teacher (who was not a programmer; she was a math teacher pressed into service) somehow decided that the natural thing for this program to do would be to sort all these numbers as it read them, so that the 'a' array would contain (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10). Having spent much more time than she had dealing with data statements, I knew that this was absolutely wrong. But I was the only one in the room who played with these things for fun. Nobody believed me. What little expectation I had of learning anything in this class, or at least having a period to hack for fun, completely vanished.
What could have been dealt with in minutes if we had a machine handy turned into a much longer affair. I don't recall how it ended but I'm quite sure that I was not exactly gracious when the class finally got in the same room as a machine and I could demonstrate that I knew more BASIC than everyone else in the room put together...
Anyway. I'm sure these resources are fine, and will teach kids some useful things about how algorithms operate - as long as the teachers actually know something about that themselves!
posted by egypturnash at 1:27 AM on January 9, 2011 [2 favorites]
This proved to be a problem when we were being taught about READ and DATA. The textbook had a little program along these lines:
10 dim a(10)
20 for i=1 to 10:read a(i):next
30 for i=i to 10:print a(i): next
40 data 8,6,7,9,10,3,4,1,2,5
(probably written more verbosely)
And the question, what would the results of this program be?
The teacher (who was not a programmer; she was a math teacher pressed into service) somehow decided that the natural thing for this program to do would be to sort all these numbers as it read them, so that the 'a' array would contain (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10). Having spent much more time than she had dealing with data statements, I knew that this was absolutely wrong. But I was the only one in the room who played with these things for fun. Nobody believed me. What little expectation I had of learning anything in this class, or at least having a period to hack for fun, completely vanished.
What could have been dealt with in minutes if we had a machine handy turned into a much longer affair. I don't recall how it ended but I'm quite sure that I was not exactly gracious when the class finally got in the same room as a machine and I could demonstrate that I knew more BASIC than everyone else in the room put together...
Anyway. I'm sure these resources are fine, and will teach kids some useful things about how algorithms operate - as long as the teachers actually know something about that themselves!
posted by egypturnash at 1:27 AM on January 9, 2011 [2 favorites]
Dude, COBOL has actually paid my bills. Those few hours in high school totally prepared me for getting a last-minute thing done for my corp. Well, that and Murach's.
The glue program I wrote is in daily constant use by a Transnational Acronym some folks here might be very familiar with. As in, you probably have a few plastic cards with their name on it in your wallet.
But still, the take-away is that high school CS actually partially prepared me for real-world enterprise computing decades later. Card stock paper nybble computers and all.
posted by clvrmnky at 7:13 AM on January 9, 2011
The glue program I wrote is in daily constant use by a Transnational Acronym some folks here might be very familiar with. As in, you probably have a few plastic cards with their name on it in your wallet.
But still, the take-away is that high school CS actually partially prepared me for real-world enterprise computing decades later. Card stock paper nybble computers and all.
posted by clvrmnky at 7:13 AM on January 9, 2011
Gah! Do you neo-Luddites have to take technology out of everything?
posted by Xezlec at 9:38 AM on January 9, 2011
posted by Xezlec at 9:38 AM on January 9, 2011
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