krschmidt

Thanks for putting this together!

I was surprised by the number of jobs near where I live - until I realized they were all in the town of Remote, OR. Sorry that my state abbreviation is also a word.

Is there a replacement for the mini? We're still using ours, and don't need the full Google Search Appliance.

Eugene, OR Community College with an interest in upcoming academic technology and open source searching for: * Web Administrator - Moodle, Drupal, LAMP http://jobs.lanecc.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=51921 * Programmer/Analyst - Oracle, Sungard Banner http://jobs.lanecc.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=51946

So you're talking about a curriculum for a programming class? If so, read on.

Most of the teachers I work with would prefer to use the curriculum provided by their district because that's what their colleagues are using. This isn't out of laziness, but because it's helpful to have someone else teaching the same stuff so you can bounce ideas off each other. Rather than selling to educators, you might actually have to sell to districts. But computer science is such a small part of most districts, buying a curriculum for two or three teachers is likely a low priority.

I'm not sure if you're targeting Middle Schools (which to me seems like a very small market. I can't think of a district near me that offers programming to Middle School students) or High Schools, but many High Schools only offer AP programming. This must be taught in Java and due to time constraints it must be taught to the test. That makes designing a curriculum very difficult and most teachers would be hesitant to look at game design.

That isn't to say there aren't markets for stuff like this. I was in the market for it three years ago. Plus what we do offer at Middle Schools (Word/Excel/Web Searching) could be dramatically improved.

I did put together an ebook for my class, but I deliberately stopped short of offering it as a pdf/epub. If I officially listed an ebook as my text, I'd potentially be in trouble with my district for not making the text accessible to students without a Kindle/Nook/Computer.

Me too, and for a rather similar purpose, though for a different market. http://www.myhandin.com

That'd be my gut reaction too, but that might just be because we understand the importance of it. Attrition rates are really high in intro CS classes. When loops still seem like a difficult concept, is version control just one more thing too much? On the other hand, if you spend time before starting programming just learning version control with plain English text, are you encouraging students to drop because they're not getting to program like they expected? And when most projects are 10 to 15 lines long and done alone, is there an effective way to still show how version control is superior to the undo button?

I love version control, and I love Github, but when is the proper time to introduce students who have never programmed before to version control?

Internet speed can also be an issue, for good or bad. I'll hit the coffee shop if I'm syncing with a server regularly or know I'll be researching a bunch, but the I'll hit the library if I want the internet to feel like dial-up.

I don't think K-12 is the problem here. Usually the problems I'm teaching are trivially small (find max of a list, etc). The only other CS class we offer is the AP class, and it's taught to the test - but it's an algorithms and data structures class, not a software engineering class.

It seems to me like the problem is at the college level. My school offered just one software engineering class, which taught one monolithic method of developing software. A couple of semesters developing different types of software using different methods of development would have been nice.

http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/python-teaching.htm won me over, and I now use Python exclusively in my introductory programming class. I find we cover about 3 months more material than when we did C++.

But barrydahlberg has a valid point - VB.Net is a decent language for a first course. Originally we had an alternative first programming course that used VB.Net. A lot of kids liked it better just because it was so easy to make a graphical program. We used to get a lot of kids interested in programming just by having them play with the colors of their VB.Net programs.

I sometimes hop on KGS, but I'm very rusty. Probably ~17k. Wonderful game. I teach it to the kids in my programming class whenever we have a few moments of free time (usually day before Thanksgiving, etc).

Gettysburg College