
Carnegie Mellon launches free high school CS curriculum - pplonski86
https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/january/cmu-launches-high-school-computer-science-curriculum.html
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souprock
The article mentions "rigorous Advanced Placement courses". The test for
Computer Science AB hasn't existed for years, and it has been even longer
since the tests used a language without garbage collection. The available
tests haven't been rigorous for the past two decades.

This is off too: "This isn't 'drag and drop' programming," Kosbie said. "We're
teaching them to use Python, a text-based programming language that is the
most widely taught language at the university level."

Nothing prevents a drag-and-drop code editor from being used with a serious
language. On the other hand, Python is nothing to get excited about.

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harry8
"Python, not scratch." But explained without using jargon for those who aren't
jargon fluent.

I'd love to see anyone make a better fit of it than they did from the
perspective of their target audience. It's not obvious to me how to do it but
someone may have good ideas.

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bra-ket
they should just focus on "cracking the coding interview", it's all that's
needed to get a job in CS

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blendo
Sounds like a good, challenging course for 9th graders, but is there room in
the curriculum to provide this course to all kids?

They already have 4 separate courses in math, science, language arts, and
social studies/history/poli sci. And an art/music/shop elective. And maybe
physical eduction.

Perhaps secondary school math instruction should evolve to include basic CS
concepts? (Or blend CS into a combined math/science/CS double-length course?)

A minor quibble: the first line of code listed on the web site is:

Polygon(72, 47, 85, 65, 55, 66, fill='lightGreen')

Named arguments instead of raw integers might help kids keep the
argument/parameter relationship front and center.

