saundby

I wish I could give you more than one upvote. Perhaps even a googol of them.

My nephew has $0.26 coming to him. I wonder if he'll track down a notary for the form that will charge less. Next question is: drive in the form or mail it? ;)

Pretty well captures my experience, though there's a lot to like about Python, it's 3rd parties that are making it accessible in spite of what's at python.org. Also, the CP4E concept is regularly decried as defunct and unworkable in Python forums.

Both relate to problems with Finder that go all the way back to the beginning of OS X. I suppose people used to OS X often become blind to them.

#1: Yeah, you'd think a visible sidebar with Applications visible would make sense. I've seen some of these that have an alias (shortcut) for Applications displayed in the folder, though. The non-obvious workaround I use is to press Command-N to get a new Finder window with a sidebar.

#2: Again, Finder. One possibility to recommend--have a Downloads window open in your browser. Then, even if the Downloads window for Finder hides itself, a visible connection can be made to the new file. Double-click in the Downloads window or, as I prefer, right-click=>Show in Finder.

I ignore the bounce from Downloads on the dock, and just treat it as a visual indicator of download completion, not an inducement to click like a normal bounce.

Most likely a sonic shock wave, not an explosion. Even if the meteor broke up, that's very unlikely to be the source of the sound. It's more likely like a sonic boom you're hearing.

Look closer, I think he's referring to the "filth" of a popular spreadsheet program. ;)

This dour-faced child actroid is pretty old now. Newer models aren't as odd-looking (except for the one made to demonstrate the underlying technology that looks like a Meccano project with teeth and eyeballs.) Kokoro has a travelling exhibit called "Encyclopedia of the Actroid".

http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp/english/index.html

An interesting attention getter for rescued animals. Not sure if I'd want a dog that thinks it can drive, though.

Perhaps their usability testing shows most users don't like scrolling (or that those that do prefer image searches?)

That would still allow for plenty of scrolling, even if less than infinite.

Plus, setting the cut-off at 1000 seems more of a "will not" than "can not".

I only find what I'm looking for on the first page about 1/3 of the time myself. Even after some refining of terms.

GSM is still what I buy a phone for. The ready availability of Wifi without monthly fees makes LTE less significant for me as time goes on.

Or play on that squares thing, and use some natural squares in the name: W8-4-9

Selecting your data can make your numbers look better than numbers that are generated in a more authoritative fashion. If you're in the business of developing a market of suckers, this may be a profitable practice.

Yeah, like, back in the old days we had a link to an 8085 instruction reference card that got some attention. I think that was about four months ago... ;)

And, of course, http://visual6502.org/JSSim/, where it's acting like an HDL.

One thing I've seen in the Khan Academy videos is that they focus on one small slice of information at a time. This is often hard to do in the classroom. While I tend to lean toward the "cover less in class, but get better understanding of what is covered" side of the spectrum in my teaching, I'm still often giving the equivalent of 2-3 Khan video descriptions in each class.

Personally, I refer my students to the Khan Academy videos in class as well as other online resources. They don't much for many students, but for others they make the subject matter click.

IMO they're a boon, as are the other online resources as well as abebooks and Powells where great textbooks from the past are available for less than lunch money as alternate resources.

25 minutes to do a copy? I remember it taking about 45 minutes per disk to do a backup copy.

I also remember having to break out the oscilloscope every time I played F-15 Strike Eagle and Psi-5 Trading Company to re-align the disk head. Until a friend gave me cracked copies, which allowed me to simply play the games. (By that time I had purchased two copies of Psi-5, after the first disk refused to recognise itself as a valid copy!)

Worst copy protection I ever encountered, until Lotus 123 came along.

This may be too techie for what you're looking for, but if you fry it, there's only $30 at stake, not 300: http://timeline-inc.com/hacker.html#mini

It's a 1.4cm full color LCD display. It needs an NTSC composite signal.

Talk to a lawyer even if it's worth less. Even if all you do is a nastygram, a nastygram on a lawyer's letterhead is worth far more than one from you. It won't be very expensive, but may have very valuable results all by itself.

Interesting. But I don't think they've chosen the best sample to work with.

Cute quiz, but they needed a broader range of people for comparable results. My best match was only 68%.

Plus, there are presumptions in some of the answers that'll push you elsewhere than where you might really be.

But hey, still a pretty good quiz for the internet. ;)

The comments catch what Groupon missed. Worth more than the blog entry itself.

Good comments, thanks!

I take on "new" on day 2, when I cover variables.

And static gets revisited several times. I have to be brief with the first class, the main point is that it serves a function, it's not just noise. When we build a class that we use from another class (third or fourth lesson) we use a class method initially, then a non-static method, and get a chance to see the differences in action. This sets us up for static fields in the following class.

Then we talk about how static members relate to classes vs. instantiated objects. Often someone's already encountered the reference from static context problem, so that comes up as an example in the discussion.

Later we go back and look at Hello, World with "new eyes."

At these students' ages a lot of the learning needs to be experience rather than theory.

Yeah, I agree my description of static needs to be changed on that page. It's not what I use in class.

I teach static from a general standpoint of stating belonging to the class rather than an object of that class. For didactic purposes, sometimes you phrase what-ifs in odd ways to get the point across.

Still, wrong on every claim? How many main()s do you put in your classes? Do you leave static out of your main() signature without getting an error in compilation?

I appreciate corrections, but can we avoid hyperbole?

As to the HTML, if I'd used the bare header tags with text the counter argument would be that I'm not teaching proper HTML.

Plus, brevity masquerading as simplicity is not the purpose of the lesson. The point that HTML is seldom treated as too complex for beginners is the real point here. Yet it gets pretty complex pretty quickly. The students handle it.

I show HN and YC to my middle school students and tell them a little about it. I just want them to see it. They'd rather spend time reading snopes if that makes you feel any better. ;) The only time I've heard of a middle school kid going back on his own was when one kid showed it to his dad, who was thinking about starting his own business.

I spend more time going over HN and YC with my high school students. I don't have time to teach them how to do their own start-up in class. But I want them to be exposed to the idea, and know some places to go for more info if they take to the idea, want to learn why I've ruined their life by teaching them Java, or whatever. :)

I use the Karel J Robot examples with Greenfoot in my middle school classes once we start using Greenfoot. It's a great tool.

I'm not stupid either, and I can tell a response that's intended to please me from one that's sincere. My students are encouraged to tell me when I'm boring them and when something I'm doing in class just plain sucks.

You're missing the point of the question. I don't ask them to compare complexity against other languages they don't know. They were asked whether this was too complex for the class, judging against other subjects we've covered.

Some of my lessons have been too much for them. They've let me know. Others have moved too slowly, or not given them enough credit for being able to take new things on, they've let me know that, too. That evaluation is part of the class, we do it all the time. I experiment with the class, and they enjoy that since they know their feedback is part of what builds the class.

Rather, it appears you're inferring things that you'd like to infer about the class that support your feelings.

As to python, we'll be doing python in May for a short while, as well as C and ruby. And we will be rating each. We'll be re-implementing some things that we implement in Java in those other languages as a way of giving them a test drive, trying out not just the syntactic differences but the differences in approach to solving problems with the different languages. We'll also revisit LOGO (but not LISP, I've gotten clear messages from my students in the past that they don't find that productive to cover, though they appreciate me taking the time to describe it after we've done some LISP-ish things in LOGO.)

You also seem to think I teach Java as the be-all and end-all language. And that I presume it will be the only language they ever learn. In fact, I add a lot of humor to the class by poking fun at Java's problems (you know that humor helps learning, right?) While we spend the most class time with Java of any language (though we just started today), we've had lessons using assembly language, machine language, BASIC, and LOGO already this year, plus an extensive section using HTML. After we finish the section using Java, we'll add more languages as I said above.

OK, so you tell me, what is the hot language of 2019? I'm teaching learning processes, so that my students can learn whatever languages they want. I'm starting a fire under them so that they have enough of an interest to bother.

I am very serious about this. I teach these classes because I want to. I'm not filling time or filling checklists on an academic record. These aren't programming classes. These are general computer classes, which I'm trying to use to get students interested in taking programming classes when they move on to college, so I think you're misjudging my scope and the nature of the students.

The students in my class get good grades whether they agree with me or not. If they go along to get along, it will not get them a good grade, more likely the opposite. I don't need their agreement to stroke my ego. I've got work I've done in outer space as well as in a large fraction of the world's aircraft. I don't teach for egoboo, I teach because I want these kids to learn that they don't have to sit in front of a game console running a controller because that's all they're allowed to access in this world. I want them to learn to take things apart, turn them around, and build their own things. I don't like them being trapped outside the package, stuck behind the UI, cut off from tools.

The programming I teach isn't taught to learn how to create elegant algorithms or to discuss programming paradigms. It's taught as a practical method for putting tools in their hands and helping them make the transition from consumer to creator.

Focusing too heavily on what specific language is used at this level is unproductive. So long as the language used meets some basic constraints that many languages will meet.

I put on some additional constraints. For example, I want to teach a language that's used in the real world, not a packaged educational language licensed with a boxed learning program. I can't control what systems the students have at home. I want a language that works the same way at home as at school. I also want standard graphics and sound libraries since pictures and sounds motivate students as well as being useful to illustrate what's happening with data in programs. I have a number of constraints.

At this point, Java does the job. What I addressed was the assertion that Java is too complex to use in teaching beginners. Not whether there is no simpler language for expressing "Hello, world!"

Your estimate of how long it takes to cover anything, with meaning, in class is pretty optimistic. And as to what they need to know, and why they need to know it, I think you need to approach things from a higher perspective. The point here is not to simply teach mechanics of a particular language. What the computer is up to, why, and what the student can do to control it is the point, not how quickly we can get a few characters on the screen.

You're inferring a lot. And overestimating what can be covered in a single period in a room full of 12-14 year old kids, no matter what language is used.

Part of why the class takes so long to cover a HelloWorld program is that I explain each item, provide counter-examples (wrong class name, wrong signatures for main(), multiple main()s, adding other classes and methods to the file, etc. And seeing the error messages that come with different and interpreting them. We're not just copying a canned program off the board into a text editor (even at that, how good a transcriptionist do you think a 13 year old is? They can find _amazing_ new errors in 10 PRINT "HELLO".)

And yeah, there's still a lot of black magic. But I contain it, identify it, and cut away at it through the course of the class. Coming back repeatedly to the same subjects as I do so turns out to be a pretty effective way of fixing concepts in students' minds.

I appreciate that you might do it differently. Python was among the languages I considered for the class, I've blogged my reasons for going to Java. I revisit my choice of language after each school year. Each year so far, I've come back to Java as best serving the purposes of my classes from among the choices I have, warts and all it does the job.

I do expose the students to python, we go out to python.org and spend time on the online interpreter. We also try out ruby and C using online versions.

The sorts of expansions on the basic lesson that you describe are things that I already do. It just doesn't happen in the same class period as the HelloWorld program. There isn't time, and even if I did add more to one period, it then wouldn't stick, at least not in the class format I've got to use.

I also think you have some misapprehensions about how much material you can throw at a classroom full of kids using balky old computers. No matter what language I use, there's a limit to what you can reasonably expect to cover while still providing time for students to go through the mechanical parts of the exercise (typing and running the program, interpreting the results).

So far I haven't found Java to be an obstacle in that regard. And Java allows me to do what I want in class.

You also want to know why I use the tools I do in class. That's a whole different discussion. But the short answer is that we use the tools we already know, to keep the number of new things to a minimum at any one time. We'll be introducing an IDE later (Greenfoot.) I'll be using its facilities to teach object oriented concepts more fully than I can with text, as well. Plus, once we've gotten used to using it as an IDE, we'll be rolling in the elements of the Greenfoot framework. That will give us graphics and sound, which we'll use to get immediate feedback on the operation of our code.

I discuss my use of the command line when introducing programming in another of my posts. The purpose of the class is to know the system as well as they can from as many angles as they can, among them programming. This isn't a programming class, it's a general computers class that I've decided to expand beyond "keyboarding" and MS Office boredom.

I reduce window width to give a comfortable column with where the document allows, then use scrolling as a place-marker. I'm a line or two down from the top of what's displayed.

I'll also cut and paste into a plain text editor, adjust font, etc. to suit, then read that offline.