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A comment on John Resig: Redefining the Introduction to Computer Science at Khan Academy. Parent comment

Re:John Resig: Redefining the Introduction to Computer Scien... by VikingCoder on Tuesday August 14, 2012 @04:16PM (#4382877)
"I absolutely applaud the effort, and I sincerely wish you success."

I wish all trolls applauded effort and wished people success.

I may not be expressing it well, but I honestly think calling this "Computer Science" is absurd. Feel free to call people who disagree with you a troll any time it's more convenient than actually having a conversation with them.

I wish we could discuss the wild success of One Laptop Per Child, which tried a similar approach. But we can't. And I personally believe it's because of this "tinker-toy hand's on" approach that One Laptop Per Child has failed so spectacularly. I fear that this approach will shove Khan Academy's "Computer Science" section into a similar footnote of history.

I also think all of this is too important to do wrong, so it pisses me off to see a group so prominent make such a misstep.

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Re:John Resig: Redefining the Introduction to Computer Scien... by rhc2104 on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @02:59AM (#4384950)
I should point out that Harvard teaches programming in Scratch for the first 2 weeks of their introductory CS course.

http://scratched.media.mit.edu/resources/harvard-cs50-introd...

According to slide 27, most students prefer it that way:

http://cs.harvard.edu/malan/publications/[email protected]

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