pgbovine

http://suif.stanford.edu/suif/suif1/suif-overview/suif.html

As a reference, some of the grad students originally on this project are senior full professors now :) And the last author is now the President of Stanford University.

Interesting insight about "stickiness"; reminds me of high school cliques, college fraternities/sororities/clubs, etc. Looking forward to your post.

This is gold :) Nice write-up, Jeff.

http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-h...

While some of this foundational work was done in government labs, a fair amount came out of university labs.

The primary outcome of university research is validated ideas in the form of academic papers. 99% of those papers will be forgotten in a decade (and derided by cynics in hindsight as "useless ivory towering"). But the remaining 1% will push the world forward in meaningful ways. The main issue is that it's impossible to tell which projects will lead to that 1%, so funding agencies try to invest broadly. That's the optimistic view, at least :)

Check out Theseus from MIT / Adobe Research: http://blogs.adobe.com/open/behind-the-scenes-with-theseus-a...

[Edit: I'm not eloquent enough to make a convincing case at 2:20am, but I don't think that extra sentence was merely a curious non-sequitur, even if it could be cut without modifying the point of that paragraph. I can list out tons of points/counterpoints in my head ("what about redheaded people with thin left eyebrows? why not mention them? would that be a non-sequitur? what about the historical and socioeconomic implications behind this demographic group and its relationship to technological access? ..."), but I don't have enough expertise to give this topic a proper treatment. So I'll leave this thread by recommending the following two books:

http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Mar...

http://www.amazon.com/Stuck-Shallow-End-Education-Computing/...

]

You can delete this sentence -- These students are more likely to be female or from underrepresented minority groups. -- and the meaning of the previous sentence remains unchanged. The key point is that CS0 is important for attracting people who didn't have prior background in computing and thus could have a latent interest in CS that would otherwise go unmet. Now, it turns out that a larger fraction of those students are from certain underrepresented groups, but even if that weren't true, it wouldn't make the case for CS0 any less important for the "group" that I think you're referring to, which is "students who have latent interest in CS but not enough prior exposure to know that they would love CS." (I wish I could've expressed that in an elegant mathematical equation!)

[Edit: when I wrote "even though this is a minority population", I didn't mean "minority" in the underrepresented minority sense ... I meant that this is a small population compared to all CS majors. Again, English != set logic]

ideally you want to mix the best of both worlds. here's a prototype demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3oarDuZPL0

As a clarification, a CS0 or CS1 course usually has no CS prerequisites, so if a course you're trying to mention has other CS prereqs, then it's probably not CS0 or CS1.

ha, feel free to DOWNVOTE so that this appears at the very bottom, so that it's visible :) but don't downvote so much that it disappears.

i wish the blogging platform supported some version-control friendly format.

[Edit: I made a typo about Penn CS120 ... I mistakenly found another course named CS120 that wasn't at Penn. Also, Harvard CS51 calls itself "Computer Science II" [1], implying that it's a CS2 course. It probably has CS50 as a prereq, tho I haven't double-checked yet.]

[1] http://cs51.seas.harvard.edu/docs/lectures/2013/1-overview.p...

I'll address each of your paragraphs in turn:

1.) Re: CS0 vs. CS1. Like you mentioned, I was very upfront about the methodology for this analysis. And I am very aware that most CS majors do not ever take a CS0 course. But please also be aware that there are a minority of CS majors that do take CS0 before moving onto CS1, usually because they feel ill-equipped to take CS1 right away. I harp on this point because even though this is a minority population, it's a very important one since those are students who, without CS0, would not major in CS. These students are more likely to be female or from underrepresented minority groups. On a related note, a larger and larger fraction of non-CS majors are taking CS courses because they recognize the value of programming and computational thinking. (Again, these non-CS majors are more likely to be female and from underrepresented minority groups.) So I would argue that CS0 is just as important as an "introductory programming" course as CS1, if not more important, due to the rise of the non-software-engineers-who-want-to-learn-programming population. [Edit: And I think that a CS department's choice of language to offer to the CS0 student population is still very significant, and a decision that is not made hastily.]

2.) Re: Python CS0 and Java CS1. You are absolutely right, and in my original article, this sentence appears in the discussion section: "Some schools have fully switched over to Python, while others take a hybrid approach, offering Python in CS0 and keeping Java in CS1."

3.) Re: AP exams using Java. Thanks for the clarification. I will remove "it's unclear whether that will change anytime soon." from the article.

[Also, as to cyorir's comment that the chosen data may have been cherry-picked, please rest assured that I tried my best NOT to cherry pick. If I had cherry picked, wouldn't I have made Python look even better? ;) Any incomplete data is strictly due to human error or oversight on my part, and I gladly welcome any correction requests via email.]

While that might be true, there's also a population density issue. CA, NY, and MA have large urban populations, so more students are likely to attend those elite colleges.

That said, I know for a fact that admissions officers and student volunteers from these schools literally spend months driving around the country to recruit prospective students from traditionally underrepresented states. They are well aware of this perception of elitism and want to combat it. One of my good friends from MIT was from Montana. (Yeah, anecdotes != data, but this issue you mentioned is very legitimate and something that Top 10 universities are actively trying to address.)

I love these sorts of interactive, visual essays and would love to find ways to lower creation times.

also, seems like a case of Stolen Identity. sorry couldn't help myself ... my favorite Mad TV clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g6tNfwp7UE