How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again | Hacker News Reader

How I got a CS degree with pen and paper and why I'm doing it again

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Disappointed. I thought the article was going to focus on why a computer isn't even necessary for a computer science degree. In other words - how a computer science degree is mostly just a degree in mathematics, and a lot of the coding that you do (algorithm work, obviously not a software engineering or programming intensive course) should be done with pencil.

I have been seeing a lot of articles claiming that a barrier to CS curriculum in high school is that they don't have the technological capabilities to support such curriculum. Nonsense. If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer. Pencil and paper only.

Never?

That sounds like a sure way to make sure any students who took that class would be very disengaged.

I did my first programming with pencil and paper, and I'm still engaged 30+ years later

We're talking about high school here though. Seems to me it would be like running a chemistry class without doing any lab work.

Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but that's how chemistry is taught in 3rd world countries. Labs are a luxury :)

Eh fair, although RPi Zeros are pretty cheap these days :).

And rural America :)

I agree. One of the most magic moments when you start programming is when you write your first program that does a truly significant amount of work. You run it, you're still kind of on human time scale and think it's going to take a few seconds, but it finishes instantly. That was the moment that really hooked me into programming.

Depends on what you are doing. If you're trying to teach Van Emde Boas trees, then yeah without coding no one will like to work on that, but there are so many insightful topics.

One example would be modal logic. There is something inherently attractive about reasoning about time. Once you put it into context, it is very difficult to not find it inspiring.

Computer science is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use."

-- Hal Abelson (1986)

> Computer science is not really about computers

He also added (prepended, to be precise) that it's not a science. :)

well the answer to that depends on whether in one's language "mathematics" is a "science" -- as I have (to no small surprise) discovered, in English it's quite often not, and there is no really agreed-upon definition of what science is...

I took AP Computer Science my senior year in high school (would have been... 2010? So 6 years ago) and we didn't touch computers until about halfway through the class. Before then, it was all theory and logic and big O and the like mostly in pseudocode. Then, we jumped into writing Java to match the theory we had learned. It worked wonderfully, and I found my first year in college was pretty much just re-learning what I learned that year in high school but much, much, much, much (much) slower because they were teaching Java WITH the theory instead of separate to it (which had a side effect of students being locked-in to Java in later years and not able to reason about theory in other languages)

Also, the AP test that we had to take after all was said and done was required to be done in pencil. So it was good to be used to writing pseudocode and actual code in pencil.

In college, I wouldn't have even considered typing my notes during class. I'd say about half the students in my classes used pencils, the other half typed (but were always actually checking facebook, looking at reddit, etc.). After a while, I stopped taking notes altogether when I figured out they really don't help me in any way and I never go back to them (anything I could forget is a google search and a stack overflow answer away).

>Nonsense. If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer. Pencil and paper only.

You would want to be the Dolores Umbridge of high school computer science?

Growing up I didn't have a computer at home. I would write my solutions in a paper, evaluate it mentally/with a pencil a few times, take it to my school or a friend's place and run it; only to find there is an issue. Rinse and repeat. I did this quite a few times and got really good at it. However, none of the languages are intuitive when you are learning it for the first time. You could easily be stuck at the most trivial of things about syntax, scoping, ..etc. Mistakes in a situation like mine are expensive - it usually takes a few days before I could verify again if my solution worked. It's really easy to lose your patience and move on.

> If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer. Pencil and paper only.

That would be a disservice to the students. Being able to code is probably the best predictor for students successfully completing a CS degree.

You can write code with pencil and paper

Yes but it's a little harder to prove that the algorithm you've described works.

But almost nobody proves that programs they write on computers work either. When was the last time you proved a program correct?

They didn't mean "prove" as in mathematically "prove" than an algorithm works, they meant it in mechanical terms (does it compile, does it run, does it past test inputs, etc.).

That is not a proof by the CS standard though -- well, unless the job is defined as "write a program that processes these N test inputs known in advance", in which case a program that prints the expected hardcoded output in response to each of the expected inputs and otherwise returns an error would be a good implementation :)

I personally avoid using a word "proof" to mean anything other than a mathematical proof. It can be done with code, for sure, but as grandparent said, usually isn't.

You don't prove that it's "correct," as there is no such thing as a "correct" program. You prove that it works.

I think you may be assuming that the purpose of a CS degree is to teach people how to write programs that work, while it's really not :)

And there is such a thing as a correct implementation of an algorithm. Running it does not exactly prove things either, and it might not necessarily work on actual hardware, but it does show that the person understands at least part of the material.

My first formal CS class was in high school (last two years), and my teacher then personally advised parents not to get a computer just for that class. Looking back I think that was one of the best things a teacher has done for me.

Along with all the other reasons why this is terrible, I would despise this because I just can't write as fast as I type. Having to use paper/pencil for the SAT was troublesome enough.

At least for me, as I explained in the article, this was a primary benefit of writing out notes. Having less time forced me to summarize and synthesize, rather than transcribe.

Thanks for the downvote - I was referring to actual coding. And with regard to note taking, I never had the problem of transcribing instead of summarizing because I was typing.

I didn't downvote you.

why, so they can be completely unemployable?

figuring out how to get your shit to work and debugging it on the computer you're using is the actual hard part of CS.

> Nonsense. If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer.

That would be as about as engaging as a biology class without microscopes or a chemistry class without labs.

Interesting article. I can touch type but I prefer pen and paper for to do lists, mind maps, exploring problems and note taking. It's always seemed more "effective" than using a computer or my phone - even crossing off a task feels better.

I always assumed this was because I engage more areas of the brain. I'm excited to find the real reason so the research is now on my to-read list.

Definitely agreed. There's something about physically engaging with the note-taking space that can't be replicated at a layer of abstraction, through peripheral devices.

> I always assumed this was because I engage more areas of the brain

Or could it be just because it's still hard to draw things and write formulas using a computer.

In fairness, in my own notes, formulas are rare. The only thing close to drawing in my notes is a spider diagram and MindNode is probably a lot easier and friendlier than pen and paper for that.

I can probably cover my ground in Photoshop than I can on paper too.

Pen and paper just seems to make things 'sink in'. Feels a bit different to being hindered by the tool of choice!

I just went back to school for some professional certificate classes and none of the younger students use a pen and paper. I certainly felt like "the old dude" behind the times taking notes with pen and paper. I got a 4.0 though, so it was working. Also some of the young bucks were also always asking me for copies of my notes, so I took it as a compliment!

Misleading title - He took class notes using a notebook instead of a laptop.

I dared to hope to find some absurd story about turning in his CS homework in hand-written C++...

That was what I was doing for the whole first semester of my CS studies: we learned basics of C++ by writing code on paper or on the board. It was very basic stuff, aimed at people who never programmed before, so we learned about loops and other control structures cin/cout streams etc. Probably that's why my CS department stuff thought it would be a waste to let us use real computers in the university's labs :)

I'm doing an Electronics A Level, and we have to hand write code in a fictional assembly dialect.

Good to see they haven't updated the curriculum since I did it fifteen years ago!

As a TA, I've actually seen students do this in numerical analysis.

That's how tests were in Data Structures class (but C# and the method boilerplate printed, so just fill in the blank)

This article just made me feel like i am 70. Thanks. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

Same. Mid 30s, no one used laptops to take notes when I was in college. Somehow we all survived.

Also mid 30s, just wrapped up an engineering Ph.D at a major state research university. It wasn't CS, but still quite technical. Never once did I see classmates use laptops for taking notes. Maybe it was just my department, but we were pen and paper all the way. I'm a bit astonished that taking notes on a laptop is even a thing. It seems incredibly distracting and ineffective. How does one draw diagrams or write equations?

Pretty much everyone in my university took notes on paper in CS classes. Most of it was just math which is much easier to note down with pen and paper (I tried tablets with a stylus but still prefer pen+paper).

The best version I've seen for image-heavy lectures is the lecturer writing with his pad on half-prepared slides, which have also been given to the students for print-out.

It combines the advantages from pure slides with pure blackboard writing:

- The student has enough time to think and not just write (has often been a problem when the professor is writing very fast and doing complicated stuff).

- The student still gets to 'touch' the material and have their own take on it, and writes the critical points and diagrams themselves.

- There is no fear of missing something in the hand-written notes when as when deciding between writing and thinking/try to figure out which parts to note down.

... and then also record the lecture in case you missed anything else!

Better title: "How I decided that a practice that works better for me is clearly superior to others (and why I'm writing a blog to be smug about it)"

That could be the title for almost every blog post ever, though.

I can't help but think...I got my CP/CS degree with pencil and paper, and the only computer I used was a timeshared VAX and PDP11 at the university lab, so I'm not really sure what the big deal is here.

Sure I wrote some code on those systems, but 90% of my work was done with pencil, papar, and a HP11c calculator.

I took up penmanship as a hobby about a year ago, and now carry fountain pens and write down most everything I would have previously typed.

It's actually a well-known thing in the fountain pen community that writing notes instead of typing them aides in comprehension.

That is awesome. I love that there is a fountain pen community!

There are thousands of us. Check out /r/fountainpens.

There's even an IRC channel listed in the sidebar. There are 25 of us online right now, and have been as many as 120 or so in the past. Fountain pens are more popular among IRC users than supervisord, based on channel participation :)

Misleading title and limited content aside, one sentence stood out to me:

"This wasn’t such a big deal when I was actually doing computer programming homework, since people who can code at typing speed are pretty rare."

How does everyone else feel about the "rareness"?

If by "people" he means "undergraduate students" then yes, they're probably pretty rare. On the other hand, if he means "an average programmer with 5+ years experience", probably not rare at all. Given the scope of the article, I'd assume he means the former.

Planning your code is part of coding. To truly "code at typing speed", you would have to do no prep-work or research and type your program beginning to end with no bugs (see: http://www.hackertyper.com/). I'd say that's pretty rare.

There are lot of people coming to same conclusion, learning low-tech is probably best way of doing learning. Because Computers themselves have become such a distraction, social media or tech journalism etc. There is a story in the book "Deep Work", where a finance dude Mastered programming (javascript,I would guess), with a textbook and flashcards.

If this does not change any thing, it should give all us a minute to think, the mind-numbing was technology is being pushed with a claim for improving education, but nothing empirical to back it up.

Here's a great resource for taking handwritten note taking to the next level with doodles/sketchnotes. Sketchnoting is pretty fun and does seem to help with learning.

http://sachachua.com/blog/book-accelerate-your-learning-with...

I'd be interested also to know what people think about taking notes on a tablet with a stylus. I've never done this, and I think it could provide some of the benefits of taking notes on paper, but not all. For example, turning physical pages and visualizing data in concrete locations would still be more helpful for me, since I'm a spatial learner.

I've done this for a variety of subjects, and I rather like it... but it depends on having a very good tablet and a very good stylus (e.g. iPad Pro, Surface Pro, or so on).

For me there were two key points: it makes it very easy to drop in photos of slides or diagrams, and it makes it very easy to rearrange page contents after doing a first pass of ad-hoc notes.

I'm in my last year in CS in a North American university and most people take pen and paper notes when they do take notes, and mostly only use their laptops to read previous slides again in presentations/ waste time on random internet bs. This article is making a big deal out of nothing out of the ordinary

Hahahaha, this article is funny. This explains why migrants from "the 3rd world" can take away jobs in "developed" countries ... we took notes with a pen... not by choice but because most of us could not afford a computer. How ironic.

Taking notes on a computer by itself never really helped me learn. I would always write down on paper everything I typed on a computer during class. Doing this would help solidify the lesson in my mind.

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