The First Lecture | Hacker News Reader

The First Lecture

blog.punchthrough.com

12 pointscfinger12 comments

Argghh, please do not decry the state of general education when you can't spell. I know this is a nitpick, but phrases like "I've had the good fortunate" do not help your cause.

Really? His typo invalidates his premise about how to teach engineering in a fun and engaging way?

As far as I could tell, his main concern was for the curiosity and motivation of the students, not their ability to communicate via the written word.

Typos may detract from his post, and nitpicking is fine, but your first sentence is illogical, incorrect (it's not a spelling error), and unnecessarily negative. Take it easy with the attitude, man.

Of course the typo is logically irrelevant, and yes, I should have referred to diction rather than spelling.

But I don't think my point is illogical at all. Statements like "College is broken" (the original submission title) are counterintuitive (outside of HN, anyway) enough that they strain credibility. Sloppiness strains it further.

You're right on the unnecessary negativity. It would have been more helpful to note specific typos in a friendly manner. What was posted, however, was just my knee-jerk reaction upon opening the link. That said, though it doesn't serve as a good excuse, I doubt I'm the only one who might react as such.

Listen to this wise being. Never try to motivate others into learning something you yourself are passionate about without the use of a good spell checker. Even then, you best make sure the words you use are the right ones!

Okay but what did you think of the post?

This is cool...I had no idea people didn't like microcontroller classes. At my school, "Principles of Engineering" (microcontrollers + mechE) is almost universally loved and a whole lot of fun.

http://www.olinprojects.com/tag/principles-of-engineering/

It seems that we learn in class a lot like how you originally did. Agreed that it is way better and more fun.

I've heard a lot of good things about Olin and have always been impressed by it's grads. Seems like they are doing it right. I get the impression it's still a smaller school, is that true?

Half our founding team is from olin, they came out of college waaaaay more prepared for a startup than I did out of a UC. They are doing it right.

This is great, while I've often thought I should go back to my college and bridge the glaring holes between the curriculum and reality, I never got much further than that.

Definitely alumni going back and helping their schools should be encouraged, and hopefully most dept's are humble enough to accept that help. But I worry it's a small thing that doesn't scale, have you thought about the growing online education movement as a vector?

Definitely. This is kind of the test of my hypothesis, that doing these projects in the real world create a motivation that influences your school work, life, career, etc.

I've long thought that there should be a 'maker scholarship', giving small amounts of funding to people/students building real things. I found small amounts of this in the form of sponsorships from companies, but I really had to hustle for it. Whereas I randomly (literally just showed up in my mail) received a scholarship simply because my grades were above a certain mark. The 'Maker Scholarship' idea is definitely scalable.

As far as a new kind of school, I'm not sure the best way to do that. Certainly interested in all the online activity but I do like the social feel of a 'real life' school.

Maybe there is some concept you can develop at one school that can spread to more. I'd also bet maker companies like sparkfun would be interested in sponsoring such things.

I teach programming in a university. We have to pull teeth to get alumni to come back to advise us, much less get them interacting with the students.

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