Re: [OT] Software Engineering at 14 (was: Re: Beginner's Language?)

[a.krennmair@aon.at (Andreas Krennmair)]

FM <danfm@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>  Lovely assertion. How do you know? Even worse than using test
>  scores or grades to evaluate kids is putting blind trust in
>  evaluations based on those measures. This is only tangentially
That's experience. The school now exists since the early 80's, and many of
the teachers already teach there for almost the same time.

>  related to the original point but if you think you can judge
>  14 year-olds purely based on their grades, well, I hope you
>  don't become a teacher.
How else do you want to, if not on their grades? That would be interesting.
And don't think measuring by social competence comes too short.


> > Of course they would, but in school they're supported and trained by
> > professionals, either having several years of experience in the industry or
> > being respectable computer science professors.
>  
>  I think the better test of someone's talent and motivation is
>  whether one needs this type of support and/or training.
How do you want to teach yourself project development? You obviously need
a class. The whole thing isn't that easy, so you need some advice, actually
a lot of advice. Because of that reason the subject "project development" is
taught for 3 years.

>  Perhaps I should've said "trivial" or "of no theoretical or
>  practical significance." In any case, there's absolutely nothing
Ahm, the students who did that _are_ now writing realtime applications for
a company. So it has practical significance: the students had the possibility
in school to concentrate on the things they were interested in by doing it
as a project. The result is SkyOS, and they've learned quite a lot, more than
what is taught in the subject "operating system", which is mostly based on
Tanenbaum's book (not the Minix book, the other, more theoretical one).

Andreas Krennmair
-- 
Geologists rock your world.