When I was an undergrad at Harvard there was a one semester course that gave a broad survey of physics to non-majors. The instructors knew their students generally didn’t have a high level of mathematical preparation, and they also knew they needed to make things fun, because students were generally taking this as a requirement, not out of love for the subject.<\/p>\n
The course was nicknamed, somewhat derisively, as “Physics for Poets”, since it was essentially trying to teach a highly mathematical field without actually using any math. So the question arises, are all such courses doomed to superficiality and irrelevance, or is there something good there?<\/p>\n
Today some of us faculty at NYU were discussing something vaguely similar: Is there a good way to introduce principles of computer science to non-majors who have no prior background in CS?<\/p>\n
We came to the conclusion that there isn’t one way, but there might be many ways. Computer science contains quite a few key concepts. To name just a few: looping, conditionals, variables, procedures, inheritance, computational complexity, recursion. The list goes on.<\/p>\n
And college students have many and varied interests. To name just a few: Art, photography, music, sports, cinema, politics, literature, dance, poetry, economics, theater, journalism. The list goes on.<\/p>\n
For any given interest a student might have, there is a way to teach a corresponding concept in computer science. Consider, for example, looping. Post-processing of photographs requires looping through pixels, music, poetry and dance require looping through rhythmic patterns, and so on. If you understand a field well enough, you can generally find a motivation for the use of any computer science topic in that field.<\/p>\n
Of course to turn this insight into proper course design for a given student interest is far from easy. It requires real work and preparation on the part of an educator who loves both that subject and computer science.<\/p>\n
But hey, isn’t that why we are here?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was an undergrad at Harvard there was a one semester course that gave a broad survey of physics to non-majors. The instructors knew their students generally didn’t have a high level of mathematical preparation, and they also knew they needed to make things fun, because students were generally taking this as a requirement, … Continue reading “Looping for poets”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16514"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16515,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16514\/revisions\/16515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}