🚀 go-pugleaf

kahn@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Ken Kahn) writes:
>I'd like to understand this better.  My feeling is that the good stuff in
>Computer Science is like the "Total Turtle Trip Theorem".  General/abstract
>knowledge that can be profitably applied when trying to build a program.
>I'll admit that much of CS is concerned with efficiency -- algorithms and
>understanding how interpreters/compilers/operating systems, etc. work -- and
>maybe most of the things kids do (and want to do?) are not constrained by
>execution speed or memory usage.  I dunno.

My concern is not with whether one fact is better than another, e.g., whether
the TTTT is better than loop invariants.  My concern is that the whole idea of
curriculum gets in the way of learning.  Let's not forget that the name of the
TTTT is in part a joke, using a fancy word like "theorem" about something that
kids often notice while drawing turtle pictures.  I don't think any kid or any
teacher ever actually *proves* it!  (But it's not entirely a joke either; part
of the point is precisely that kids can learn the virtue of abstracting a general
proposition from specific cases, so that you can use the general proposition to
create more specific cases later.)

If a teacher walks into class with the idea that today everyone is going to
learn the TTTT, that doesn't feel very "Logo-like" to me.  If a kid is trying
to draw a hexagon and figures out how in a generalizable way, that's great!
(And it's also fine if that kid tells other kids.)

Similarly, if the idea of loop invariants happens to come up because of something
some kid is trying to do, fine.  But if a teacher has in mind to teach loop
invariants, and therefore turns an easy problem (like factorial) into a hard
problem in order to teach The Curriculum, that's a drag.  (Yes, I acknowledge
Max's argument that it isn't really so hard.  But for the sake of argument,
let's suppose we think it is hard.)

I feel this especially strongly about computer programming, because kids just
naturally find so much to *do* with computers, without any need for adults to
impose a curriculum.  When the curriculum people come along, that gets ruined.

One of my standard stories is about one of the high school computer labs I
visited while writing my PhD thesis.  They had recently started teaching the
A.P. Pascal course.  At one point I asked about kids hanging out in the lab
after school, and the teacher proudly (!!) replied that no, kids used to hang
out in the lab, but since they started teaching Computer Science the kids have
learned that programming is unimportant in itself and merely a means to the
end of learning Computer Science.  Gack!