[plt-scheme] Guzdial: "I heart HtDP"

On Mar 11, 2010, at 10:51 AM, Arthur Nunes-Harwitt wrote:

> In a talk he mentioned that they tried HtDP at Georgia Tech, but  
> weren't satisfied with it and switched to another approach.  I  
> intend to talk to Mark Guzdial more about this.  Does anyone else  
> have more information about why HtDP was phased out at Georgia Tech?


Simple: GTech's dean decided that GTech needed to teach what was  
invented at GTech. Then they switched under the leadership of Guzdial.  
Then they developed new stuff. And then they made up random post- 
factor justifications (and yes, I mean plural) depending on where they  
published or to whom they talked. Examples:

  -- they asked a handful of girls of how they could use HtDP in  
practice and they came up with "making up lists of friends"
  -- they said it wasn't demonstrating how it could work interactively  
with GUIs
  -- they claimed HtDP lead to cheating
  -- they claimed that the book was too slow (so why replace it with  
something slower and less challenging)
  -- they fired the staff who taught the HtDP stuff and who had been  
trained here
  ...

All this happened after they told us how much they loved the  
systematic approach of HtDP, after Matthew had gone there and  
explained the story behind HtDP to the entire faculty, and they liked  
that, too.

The best news of all was that they eventually got rid of their dean.  
Too late for us. Guzdial hates HtDP for the same reason the entire EDU  
clan hates us.

And with all of this said, I still can't write down the true reason  
because emails are public speech. -- Matthias