<div dir="ltr">I'm sure you have seen Alan Kay's tirades on the same subject.<div>I do not think that the loss of the AP exam in CS is that great a loss. I tutored a friend's son for a few hours in preparation for it a few years ago, and felt increasingly like Harold Ramis teaching English as a second language in "Stripes". The test (or at least the things that I was asked to clarify) seemed to concentrate more on the syntactic and semantic filigree of java than on recognizing problem and decomposing them into digestible chunks. I was reminded of this passage from Polya's preface to 'How to Solve it' </div>
<div><br></div><div>"It is foolish to answer a question that you do not understand. It is sad to work for and end that you do not desire. Such foolish and sad things often happen, in and out of school, but the teacher should try to prevent them from happening in his class."</div>
<div><br></div><div>If it is of any consolation, though it shouldn't be, the situation is just as dire in mathematics and the sciences. Despite having been dragged through 'math' for over a decade, the average American is nearly innumerate. Judging from that track record, the average high</div>
<div>school student is probably better served by learning things him/herself, even from 'Learn world domination in 21 days', than from his/her school. (I know where you stand on 'learn x in 21 days').</div>
<div><br></div><div>I do think that having things like HDTP and DrScheme available to anyone is a step towards a solution, all that needs to be done is to let the people who want to read it know where it is.</div><div><br>
</div><div><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Matthias Felleisen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:matthias@ccs.neu.edu">matthias@ccs.neu.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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A while ago, Shriram and I wrote up a short essay on our perspective of why CS hasn't latched on in high school for some 25 years now and what we might wish to do about it:<br>
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<a href="http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/essays/not-matter.html" target="_blank">http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/essays/not-matter.html</a><br>
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This is a preliminary draft of an opinion column that will appear in CACM, ACM's "flagship" publication (whatever that's supposed to mean). -- Matthias<div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br>
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