News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by geek_at on Friday June 16, 2023 @09:46AM (#36356508)
I was a CS teacher for 8 years and the way I was able to hook like 85% of classes was I was introducing them to Hackits [1]. They all loved it because they use the web so much and this gave them the feeling of being able to look inside the matrix

This was also how I got into CS many years ago. The old tricks still work

[1] https://blog.haschek.at/2014/why-hackits-are-the-first-thing...

Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by mehere14 on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:20AM (#36356975)
I am bookmarking this website for when my kid is old enough. So please don't shut this down. Host it on cloud flare or something which has a good free plan.
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by Dah00n on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:48AM (#36357450)
It is already broken. If you follow the link in the blog post you get a 404:

https://www.socialcube.net/hackits

Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by geek_at on Friday June 16, 2023 @11:52AM (#36358726)
https://www.0xf.at/ is the correct link, I'll change it in the blog post, thanks
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by Dah00n on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @10:41AM (#36404745)
* * *
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by geek_at on Friday June 16, 2023 @11:52AM (#36358723)
I detached the hackits from socialcube so now they are on a open source repo and here -> https://www.0xf.at/
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by kareemm on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:10AM (#36356841)
These are genius. Thanks for sharing. I'll definitely be sharing w/ my kids when they get old enough. What's your take on the lower bound where kids are generally capable of figuring these out?
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by Mezzie on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:31AM (#36357135)
It's going to depend on the kid. I was doing this sort of thing at 4 or 5.
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by geek_at on Friday June 16, 2023 @11:51AM (#36358700)
I was using this with the youngest kids in our school which were like 11 but for real learning benifit I'd recommend 13 and up
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by another_story on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:26AM (#36357060)
These are great. Reminds me of some of the puzzles from hackthissite.org.

Do you mind me asking what you did after you left teaching?

Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by jtchang on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:19AM (#36356961)
These are fantastic!
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by elboru on Friday June 16, 2023 @02:31PM (#36361501)
You just unlocked a nice memory for me! I remember many years ago going to a website like that (probably the one mentioned in the blogpost) and feeling a lot of satisfaction every time I was able to “hack” the exercise. Thank you!
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by soulofmischief on Friday June 16, 2023 @04:09PM (#36363103)
Breaking peers into groups and letting them compete on wargames is also a fun exercise. Not sure how this will be impacted by LLM-powered coding software, however.
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by iudqnolq on Saturday June 17, 2023 @01:06AM (#36367475)
I put the second puzzle into ChatGPT. It makes an extremely stupid mistake but gets lucky.

GPT gets JavaScript numerical semantics utterly wrong but the only non-integer operation is a red herring: "the result [of 14/3] is approximately 4.6667, but JavaScript will store it as 4 since we are not using floating-point numbers"

Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by soulofmischief on Saturday June 17, 2023 @03:47AM (#36368188)
Is this GPT 3.5, or GPT 4?
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by iudqnolq on Saturday June 17, 2023 @03:50AM (#36368198)
3.5
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by soulofmischief on Saturday June 17, 2023 @03:19PM (#36373575)
You should try with 4 and compare. 4 is leagues better.
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by iudqnolq on Saturday June 17, 2023 @03:24PM (#36373625)
I've yet to be wowed by anything from gpt 3.5 I've gotten myself or 4 I've seen others post, so I'm not gonna buy it.
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by soulofmischief on Saturday June 17, 2023 @07:20PM (#36375737)
Doesn't this strike you as an anti-scientific, close-minded / willfully ignorant attitude?

Why not just discover for yourself? I think you would do well to have your own opinions instead of relying on others.

Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by iudqnolq on Saturday June 17, 2023 @10:50PM (#36376881)
No. There's a limited amount of hours in a day and dollars in a month I spend on discovering things.

I spent about four hours looking into LLVMs myself. I decided it was worth it for VSCode autocompletion and not worth it for anything more complex.

I'm working through a networking textbook right now in my learning time. So far my estimate is that that's a much more useful long term.

But I peek at HN posts about LLVMs. People are always telling me if I do yet one more thing I'll be wowed, but people are never posting concrete evidence of amazing things they've done. My heretics tell me that means this* is vaporware.

*Not that LLVMs are vaporware, but LLVMs allegedly an order of magnitude more useful than Copilot are.

And the results of this specific question aren't interesting. GPT 3.5 getting the second question of the first lesson in a middle school intro to programming class wrong shows its limitations. GPT 4 getting it right merely shows it's as least as capable as your average middle schooler before they've been taught programming, doesn't tell me anything interesting about it's ability to help me.

Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by soulofmischief on Sunday June 18, 2023 @04:22AM (#36378312)
This smells of Dunning-Kruger effect. Four hours is not adequate time to research the current state of the art of LLMs. You're adopting an authoritative tone a subject which you readily admit you've only spent four hours learning about.

Exactly what evidence are you looking for? What is your bar of excellence? I've had more "wow" moments than I can count. So much research is going into this space. It's definitely worth it to do a bit more yourself before writing it off.

Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by bombcar on Friday June 16, 2023 @08:22PM (#36365768)
This is similar to my hook for friends and family - show them how to use Inspect Element to change parts of the page they didn't think you could change.

That usually is an eyeopener to how the whole thing is working.

Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by musicale on Friday June 16, 2023 @09:18PM (#36366196)
How well did the XP system work in practice? Did it seem to work well for learning or did students just learn how to game the system?
Re:What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS by marcod on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:54PM (#36366766)
Oh, reminds me of http://notpron.org/notpron/