

Tech Education Doesn't Happen In the Classroom - tylermenezes
http://blog.studentrnd.org/post/34556989032/tech-education-doesnt-happen-in-the-classroom

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overshard
Just in regard to the final paragraph I do not have a college degree but have
worked for tech companies that say they require it. Usually the term for it
now days is college degree or equivalent experience...

Side note I dropped out my senior year of college because I got tired of
paying out of state tuition for what I finally saw as something useless to my
computer science education. I've not regretted this decision and the
experience I've gained in the field previous/in college working a normal
programming job put me years ahead of any peers who graduated at the same time
I dropped out.

I hate advising people to dropout or quit anything but when it comes to
computer science, go start an open source project, use one of the many
wonderful online learn to program resources or just hack away on a Linux
machine setting up a few server services and you'll learn more real world
usable computer science in a few days of doing that then you will in a year of
college.

EDIT: What I wish I would have done was went in-state and got a degree in the
arts or English or straight up math. The classes I took in regard to these
subjects are useful to me on a daily basis. I know people like to make fun of
liberal arts degrees but you learn some cool interesting stuff there, I don't
think it's useful to my job but it is useful in sounding educated and
communicating with people outside my field of work.

~~~
timwiseman
I got my degree in math and learned to program mostly on my own (1
introductory CS class in highschool and another in college). The degree has
served me well both in terms of having it on resumes and in terms of the
skills that I developped studying math.

~~~
ninetax
If I wasn't months away from graduation I would switch over to Math. I wish I
had taken more math classes in school and more programming courses online. I
hope that more math courses are offered at Udacity and Coursera. More and more
I see that programming is just applied proofs.

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zeteo
This article is full of over-generalizations, starting with the title, which
should be "Tech education can/does happen outside the classroom" (see e.g.
note [5]). Here are a few other issues:

\- "nothing [except perhaps farming] - before or since - has had such a
profound impact on the world as the development of computing and circuits".
How about fire, flight, firearms...

\- "Demand for computer scientists, for example, is exceeded by the supply at
a ratio of more than 2:1 [links to a study that is specific for Washington
State]"

\- "A university computer science track can never teach this culture. [...]
The unique culture at Stanford is exactly why Silicon Valley could never have
developed anywhere else."

\- "There was no complex problem in the first release of Facebook." Citation
needed?

~~~
tylermenezes
As to point 1, I actually changed that a long time ago, but it seems Tumblr is
caching the post on the specific page. If you go to the main blog page, it
shows up correctly.

Point 2, the study addresses the number I brought up for the entire US.

Point 3, as I wrote, "The smart universities have realized this, and target
their admissions process to select those who have it."

Point 4, Facebook tracked text. There was no complex machine learning
algorithms, no thought of scaling, no esoteric languages.

~~~
zeteo
OK, so we agree on the title at least?

2) I assume you mean the graph towards the end called Annualized Job Openings
vs. Annual Degrees Granted (2008-2018). That seems to indicate the opposite -
job openings in Computer Science exceeding degrees by a factor of ~2.5.

3) So it is possible for some universities to foster entrepreneurial spirit,
would be interesting to see what kind of factors are important for this.

4) If building Facebook were trivial, they'd have been drowned by competition
before they could achieve critical user mass. Their challenges were probably
more on the lines of good UI and achieving traction, so I see what you're
saying that they didn't exactly need PhDs in CS to build the backend. But they
did have plenty of complex problems to solve, I am sure.

~~~
tylermenezes
2) "job openings in Computer Science exceeding degrees by a factor of ~2.5."
is the point - there's way more demand than there is supply of CS degrees.

3) My argument is that they admit the people with the spirit already.

4) Right, I'm talking only about tech in this article.

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zachgalant
Part of the problem is that it's really hard for high schools to teach CS due
to it being so expensive for them. It's expensive to hire qualified teachers
and even harder to find them.

I'm making <http://codehs.com> to make it easy for _any_ high school to offer
a CS class, even if they don't have a qualified teacher.

We made a class in a box that includes videos, in-browser exercises, student
tracking tools, and teacher support from experts.

A huge part of learning to code is getting help from others and reading other
people's code. That is built in to our curriculum, so students read other
students code (who are just a bit behind them in the curriculum) and give
personal help to that student. This allows all students to get a push when
they get stuck and really improve as a coder when they get feedback.

The personal help makes CodeHS more valuable than just a tool like codecademy.

~~~
tylermenezes
Looks cool, I'd love to hear more about how it turns out!

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GauntletWizard
You can drop the "Tech". Education doesn't happen in the classroom - It
happens in the student, when they are inspired or driven to learn. Get kids
out of the classroom more, give them something to play with that uses their
skills.

