News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by hintymad on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @02:23PM (#22369031)
Just curious, what's wrong with a community college? It's cheap. It's flexible. Its admission rate is practically 100%. Its courses are not worse than a code camp's. My relative went to a CC, and I reviewed his course work. CCs does not spend much time teaching all the fundamentals, but they do teach some. In their data structure course, they don't teach student why two pivots are not better than a single pivot in quicksort nor do they cover discrete probability or classic complexity analysis extensively, but they do teach (and practice!) asymptotic complexity and why vanilla quick-sort may perform badly. They don't teach students how to prove the boundary conditions of ODE, but they do teach intuition and how to solve and apply a wide variety of ODEs. The examples can go on. They also hire teachers from industry to teach courses on data processing, frontend engineering, and etc.

With the belief that education is all about laying solid foundation for life-long learning, for job or not, I don't really see any need for coding camps. I'm not denying there are success stories, but I don't see coding camps make statistical sense.

Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by raiyu on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @02:31PM (#22369121)
I think community colleges are great, and if you can get one on one instruction anywhere it is fantastic. The challenge is that bootcamps are really designed for people who are changing careers. Which means they have already gone through college or actively working. So it becomes an issue because they are reliant on income to survive and they aren't living with their parents.

Basically it's unplanned and so much harder to able to commit two years.

Certainly do-able, but challenging when you are thinking of it from a consumer perspective. Spend two years working towards a career shift or get it done in 6 months.

Maybe community colleges can do a better job of marketing themselves.

But ultimately I think the fact that computer science isn't a requirement in all education is criminal. We study "Math" and "English" in school. "Computer Science" is the equivalent of math 100 years ago, it needs to be a mandated requirement.

Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by BlueTemplar on Thursday February 20, 2020 @12:09AM (#22372841)
One issue might be how complexity analysis (amongst other computer science concepts) already requires a not insignificant math background...
Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by superduperuser on Thursday February 20, 2020 @09:03AM (#22375099)
"" Computer Science" is the equivalent of math 100 years ago..."

Would mind expanding on that?

Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises by raiyu on Thursday February 20, 2020 @03:36PM (#22378335)
You can't live in the modern world today without understanding math.

You also can't live in the modern world without language and the ability to communicate.

To me math is a language. Different than our verbal languages, but it is still a language none the less and essential.

Programming to me is also a language. And it is as essential today as math was originally. There was a long period of history where lower economic classes were prevented from learning and educating themselves and the fact that we have education that is subsidized by the government to various levels in all major countries is something that we take for granted, but it wasn't a right that our ancestors had.

The way schools force all kids to learn math, I feel is how schools today should force all kids to learn programming and computer science.