I still owe you commentary on your site -- as soon as I get a chance.
There are a number of interesting things I picked out of your piece.
Overall, it was a great read and there's some really good stuff in it. Love the tools and I agree with a number of your key points.
Some food for thought though:
I think that the 20 hours vs 8 months is not a really good comparison. We do the AP course in less than one semester, so let's say 4.5 months.
20 hours maps to around 30 class periods. 4.5 months maps to over twice that but then our students are taking between 6 and 8 additional classes all with homework and other assorted assignments.
On the other hand, our kids have the benefit of time. I've seen plenty of kids go through cram programs, summer programs and the like and at the end they show of some pretty nifty stuff. Then it's all gone. It takes time for people to really "learn" something. If too much is compressed into to short a time, the learning is an illusion. I've seen it time and time again.
Now, working with a high-aptitude population mitigates some of this, but I've had to "save" enough kids coming through enough summer immersion programs to know that too much to quickly can do long term harm.
Another thing to consider is APCS itself -- not a great course. The College Board has done it's best to dumb it down and make it more and more vocational. It's much more of a programming course than a computer science one at this point.
I still owe you commentary on your site -- as soon as I get a chance.
There are a number of interesting things I picked out of your piece.
Overall, it was a great read and there's some really good stuff in it. Love the tools and I agree with a number of your key points.
Some food for thought though:
I think that the 20 hours vs 8 months is not a really good comparison. We do the AP course in less than one semester, so let's say 4.5 months.
20 hours maps to around 30 class periods. 4.5 months maps to over twice that but then our students are taking between 6 and 8 additional classes all with homework and other assorted assignments.
On the other hand, our kids have the benefit of time. I've seen plenty of kids go through cram programs, summer programs and the like and at the end they show of some pretty nifty stuff. Then it's all gone. It takes time for people to really "learn" something. If too much is compressed into to short a time, the learning is an illusion. I've seen it time and time again.
Now, working with a high-aptitude population mitigates some of this, but I've had to "save" enough kids coming through enough summer immersion programs to know that too much to quickly can do long term harm.
Another thing to consider is APCS itself -- not a great course. The College Board has done it's best to dumb it down and make it more and more vocational. It's much more of a programming course than a computer science one at this point.
That said, there are opportunities to get kids to think more deeply (see my post here for an example: http://cestlaz.github.io/2013/03/23/Who_won_the_election-Qua...)
Anyway, just some food for thought.