@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)

@futurebird The AP track has to build their semiconductors from sand, of course. (Let's give high schoolers hydroflouric acid, yay!)

@futurebird

Hmm fedi approved classes... Some guesses

English classes would feature the literature of science fiction, fantasy, comics and standards documents.

So many craft classes. Electronics, bike repair, sewing, knitting, needlepoint, woodworking, radio, building your own keyboard.

Insults for those other splitter socialists

How to phrase your comment as a question

Corporate sabotage.

Replacing google docs with next cloud running on a salvaged hotel door lock.

History of black and queer people in the western world.

Ecology classes covering little organisms like moss and ants.

How could I forget! How to spot the fed.

@futurebird you know, we probably would encourage something like this, but it shouldn't be the only track, there should be applied history exercises and that sort of thing

@futurebird for example, 6th graders would begin an open-ended project where they get actual laws passed by holding city council's feet to the fire

it can't have a defined time period because then the professional politicians would just stall until the project is over, which would be a key part of the lesson

@futurebird we did build a working half-adder from transistors when we were 7. we don't think building a whole calculator that way is necessarily a good idea, it's a lot of assembly and the result would be quite bulky, but it was a really neat way to test our understanding of digital logic

@wakame

I only noticed the typo in this just now. There is an extra "is" ... I don't think Mauser saw it and I didn't either.