[Its.an.education.project] Further training

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 5:40 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> +1. Computation is an important "thing to think with", whether or not
> one aspires to be a computer scientist. There are many powerful ideas
> that are readily accessible through computation, not the least of
> which is the concept of debugging. I feel strongly that we should try
> to reach every child with these tools. Those who want to go further
> will, because we'll have provided them scaffolding.
>
> -walter

+1. The lack of computation hinders many everyday activities, from
shopping to interpreting politics and economics.

Computation is inherently fascinating, and not just to geeks and
nerds. For example, it should be possible to get children in any
country engaged in probability and statistics using available
compendia of game and player records in baseball, cricket, or
soccer/football as appropriate. Or Olympic and other international
competitions. Which Brazilian footballer had the best lifetime
shots-on-goal percentage?  Which statistical measures best predict the
value of a player to a team? See the book Money Ball for a real-life
example of building a winning team for far less money than the big
teams can spend, a notion that is quite relevant to any business in
any developing nation, that is, to real life needs.

Biological population growth models are also of real-world concern in
developing nations, and there are many other examples.

> On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 3:55 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at vpri.org> wrote:
>> At Wed, 7 May 2008 19:47:44 -0400,
>>
>> C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>>  >
>>  > i spent some time a while ago porting all the 'intro to basic'
>>  > programs from my old c64 manual to pippy. you can find the result on
>>  > dev.laptop.org/git - look for pippy-examples.  (sorry, i'm on my cell
>>  > phone and can't easily get the exact url).
>>  >
>>  > i talk with juliano at fisl this year about assembling a 'learn
>>  > python' course using pippy for brazil;  i'm hoping we'll get time to
>>  > work on it when he visits this month.
>>
>>   Thanks.  The 80% doesn't have to learn programming for programming's
>>  sake, but still I dream that they learn it for a way to express ideas
>>  that are suitable to be expressed in some form and used more "daily
>>  basis".
>>
>>  A kids' version of "A multimedia approach"
>>  (http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mediaComp-plan/uploads/1/Python-mediacomp-book.jpg)
>>  might be useful.
>>
>>  -- Yoshiki
>>
>>   It seems that I'm going to go there, too.
>>
>>
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-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay