@futurebird For what grade? I want to say that I have Opinions about high school math curricula from the perspective of having taught first-year college students and wanting them to have known certain things, but you've taught first-year college students too, probably more than I have.

@futurebird the ones who survive the FOSS gulag will be a different sort of creature

I realize that "teach the fifth graders Dvorak... then teach the math faculty Haskell" is probably how *I* sound to my colleges most of the time. That is sobering and helpful to keep in mind as I try to elevate the expectations for understand computer science a little... a task that must be done if our students will be masters of the machines rather than the other way around.

@Alon

I mostly work with 5-12 at present. Our students have a very advanced liberal arts curriculum and some of them even study Linear Algebra in math before they graduate. I don't think our CS curriculum is at the same level as the rest of the subjects.

@futurebird
"Okay, kids. Before the old white men from the 70's try to infest your malleable young brains with the 'proper' way to build a compiler, let us talk about prefix notation really quick, which leads is naturally to lisp..."

@wakame

"... leads naturally to lisp"

what a peculiar combination of words

@futurebird

"So, back in the 80's, a guy named Niklaus Wirth, yes, another white guy, that's why we are here, to change that, so that Wirth guy was likely annoyed by loud computers.

Which is why he and others build the Oberon operating system, which fit snugly inside the memory of a computer, which allowed him to remove those pesky old hard drives which where like little record players, yes, the things you might see when you meet your friend's hipster parents.

Smaller programs also meant less computation, which meant less heat, less required power, overall a completely silent computer.

Sounds like magic? Still is. Which is why we will be writing our own operating system in this course.

What? No, not for a Raspberry Pi. Think smaller. Think ESP-32.
Yes of course it will have internet access."

@futurebird How is linear algebra taught? I learned it as part of the GSCE/A-Level curriculum and it was not taught well - it was taught purely as matrix manipulations and would not be taught as anything else until my *second* college linear algebra course.

@futurebird @hllizi
Don't forget the dark side of the Mast: We'd have highly cultivated self-sustaining hydroponics eben in dark basements to produce all kinds of veggies, fungi, spices & medical herbs.

@futurebird I found that a lot of things in school, especially in maths, were far too oriented towards specific goals, which become obsolete long before the curriculum is changed. In the UK and USA, a lot of the mathematics curriculum was a reaction to Sputnik: we needed people who could do calculus to build rockets. Now, if you’re building a rocket, you’ll formulate the differential equations but on one will ever solve them by hand. And, in the rush to get people to practice applying some mechanical rules, you don’t teach them the underlying theory that lets them understand why any of it works.

So the big thing I’d want from any curriculum is for the learning outcomes to be clearly articulated and motivated. You need to know this to understand taxation, you need to know this to understand the judicial system, and you need to know this because it’s a huge area of knowledge and you might later want to explore some of it are all valid reasons (and not an exhaustive list). But ‘before mechanical calculators were a thing, it was vitally important to national security that we had a few thousand people who were really good at this’ is not.

I’d want to focus a lot more on foundations and teaching people to learn. We live in the Information age. It’s really easy to find out information about any subject. The key things I want people leaving school with are the ability to think critically, to evaluate sources, and to place new knowledge somewhere in their own taxonomy. And a solid grounding in Haskell, of course.

@futurebird I use Dvorak, but I’m not an evangelist for it. It needs more study.

And as for Haskell, there are good reasons why (almost?) no one uses it for production software. You can learn a lot of computer science concepts from programming in any language.

@Alon

It's the same Linear Algebra course undergrad math majors would take motivated mostly by solving systems of linear equations, but with a good bit of theory too.

@SistaWendy

I aim to be "language agnostic" in my teaching goals. So now and then I'll introduce a short program in Java or C or even BASIC and show how it corresponds to python which we use most often.

@futurebird

So, if you put me in charge, for kids 5th grade up, I would ditch scratch for text based languages. These are the ones I'd consider:

SonicPi - pros: quick to learn, great output, integrates really well into a music curriculum. Cons: Very domain specific, does not teach good coding style, has hard limits on what it can do, even in sound.

Logo - pros: invented for teaching. Can control robot movement. Reached list programming. Cons: Extremely unfashionable. Very domain specific. The students might vet into Lisp.

Java - pros: actually a good teaching language due to strong typing. Can be introduced via processing.org. Cons: the ideal.language is something that has the discipline of Pascal and this doesn't.

Python - pros: will integrate into their games. Does everything. Cons: The potential for bad habit forming is high, so the marking of this will feel punitive as it will have to give many or most points for style rather than output.

Pascal : If this were oop, honestly the best teaching language.

@futurebird

9:00am - Math taught like they did in the USSR
10:00am - Fortran/Haskell/x86 assembly
10:45am - Snack :3c
11:00am - Retro Computing History
12:00pm - Lunch 🥪 c
12:30pm - Nature walks (graded on cool rocks you find)
1:00pm - Reading (Fedi has a broad literature base, idk what they’d be reading about)
2:00pm - Costume and fursuit design classes

How’d I do

@musevg @futurebird @hllizi welding, bicycle maintenance and outright construction. “Anti-capitalist transportation for teens: how to get around without paying for anything, dumpster-diving and visiting the local transfer station to get a free bike, fixing it up and maybe upgrading it to an e-bike with discarded e-waste”

@futurebird With things like Cramer's rule systematizing linear equations, motivation for why we gaf about determinants, why matriz multiplication works the way it does, etc.?

(As a TA, I loved using crypto-category theory to explain linear algebra to second-years, drawing an analogy between studying the real numbers and their metric properties through studying differentiable functions and studying vector spaces through studying linear transformations.)

@futurebird well... maybe one day i'll get this dream up and running
http://blackskimmer.blogspot.com/2007/07/before-decending-into-question-of-wher.html

Shorter Intro To My Complexity Lab Manual (still in preparation)

A brief outline of the complexity lab manual: 11 chapters I was originally motivated to put together the Complexity Lab Manual in order to...

(blackskimmer.blogspot.com)

@futurebird one thing that horrified me going back to working in the schools was that there was absolutely NO training in natural history.

granted i didnt learn that in school (70s) either (ok in 5th grade we DID have to do an insect collection (i suppose i went a little overboard learning how to count tarsal segments of beetles etc..) but after a life of natural history, i found it shocking. luckily my dad got me started on that (and the AMNH)