Teaching the Largest Programming Lesson | Hacker News Reader

Teaching the Largest Programming Lesson

mathspp.com

51 pointsRojerGS6 comments

CS50 on youtube has had 1 million + views. Isn't that a larger programming lesson? I don't see a difference with a video and a lecture hall at that scale.

Guinness World Record titles are (and necessarily have to be) highly qualified in order to prevent false, dubious or unclear records. The "lesson" for example would have to have defined audiences to be even measured in the first place. Note that there are actually two related titles here:

- Largest computer programming lesson [1]

- Largest computer programming lesson (multiple venues) [2]

This attempt only broke the first, and if you look at initial news reports on the second you will see that the current title holder for the second was actually meant to do so too. In the other words, the second title was created probably because that very attempt utilized telecasting via YouTube and thus exposed a gap in qualifications. I guess you can still challenge the second title holder with enough justifications, but GWR probably will just make a new title of the Most viewed computer programming lesson video...

[1] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/117645-la...

[2] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/377395-la...

Or in a shorter sentence: getting a video to 1M views is a much different achievement from getting 1668 students in a single room to learn about something.

I mean this constructively but I feel that if you are teaching such a large cohort, you have an obligation to give them correct information. You should not be showing code with bugs in it.

What bug(s) were shown?

> cohort

Does it matter how you group together the people you're teaching? If you group them into smaller cohorts but same total number, do you have less of an obligation? Or do you just like how pretentious the word sounds?

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