Hacker News Reader

Folks, you don't need proprietary software or an iThing to get help with SICP. Hop on #scheme on freenode and check out http://schemers.org/ for resources.

I do love IRC, but what Understudy gives you is a one-to-one relationship with another person who cares.

It means that Thursday evening, when you're tired, it's easier to pick yourself up and work, because doing so gets you a _better_conversation_ on Saturday. I'm a cellist - this comes from private music lessons (and also karate).

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_Sigma_Problem . In that study, the median person learning one-to-one performed at the 98th percentile in a control group. That's huge!

Any plans to do an Android version?

Are people on #scheme pretty open to newcomers coming and and asking random questions about SICP?

The problem I've had when asking similar questions on another forum (not on #scheme) was that people would often assume I was trying to get help on homework and rudely blow me off (I've been out of uni for over a decade). So I stopped asking for help, and muddle through on my own.

That's an excellent idea. I'd be very interested in having this sort of help, and later passing it forward.

The actually app however seems to only run on one make of tablet (that I don't happen to own). I could be wrong, but it seems to me that most people'll be doing SICP exercises on a real computer, rather than a tablet. Why did you decide not to do, say, a webapp - or even to just assign the pairs and let them use whatever communication medium they have in common (skype, hangouts, IRC, whatever)?

Mostly because a tablet is very well suited to the whiteboard, and we find that the whiteboard _really_ helps for this kind of working collaboration.

It makes it really easy to gesture and discuss visually.

As far as iPad vs Android - that's just because we have to start somewhere. Also, I worked at Apple for 7 years, so it's definitely the environment I'm quickest at programming.

That said, if people actually like what we're doing, who knows. The main point is the conversation, the tech just enables it.

(Oh - and yeah, you definitely do the SICP exercises on the computer. That's by yourself, though. When we chat once a week, we do often write out snippets of code or problems, but the use of the interpreter already happened.)

Cool idea, will be curious to see how it goes (don't own iStuff so can't directly participate).

Live remote video-learning, I've found, tends to require a good friend of comparable skill level to work. If you discover that strangers can make this work sustainably, that's definitely interesting and important.

I think that's true if your setup is symmetric. You and your friend have to go at the same pace, you get anxious about holding them up or coming off as dumb, etc.

This is an asymmetric setup. You talk through whatever material the less-advanced student got through that week. More like YC office hours.

> Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes

Why does your app have this rating? Don't get me wrong, I love Lisps as much as the next person, but...

More seriously, is it because of the video-chat feature?

> More seriously, is it because of the video-chat feature?

Yes. :-) When people tutor kids, they make sure there's always another adult in the room. That's hard for us, so no kids.

Sounds like the learning equivalent of a Ponzi scheme ;)

In all honesty, though, this sounds like a really cool idea. I may check it out.

More like the learning equivalent of BitTorrent. I hope they have enough seeders!

Yup, kinda! Except in a Ponzi scheme, value only flows down. Explaining something really straightens it out for yourself.

Conversation isn't zero sum.

Philipp Schmidt is a big proponent of peer-to-peer learning, and he calls it a pyramid scheme himself. :P http://dmlcentral.net/blog/philipp-schmidt/great-peer-learni...