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From: cuccia@ucbvax.ARPA (Nick Cuccia)
Newsgroups: net.college,net.cse
Subject: Re: Should Computer Science be taught at the High School level?
Message-ID: <3967@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 31-Dec-84 02:30:34 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.3967
Posted: Mon Dec 31 02:30:34 1984
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> Of course, all those freshmen who walked in with a blank slate fared better
> than those who carried high-school programming knowledge because
> 
> 	-)  the high-school programmers invariably learned how to
> 	    'program' in BASIC or FORTRAN IV on incredibly-outdated
> 	    equipment (In high school, I learned on a Nova 2/10 
> 	    which, when driving four terminals <3@110baud, 1@300 baud>
> 	    was as slow as a VAX with a >30 load average),

My first exposure to computers in school was when I was in eighth
grade, in junior high, in 1977-78 (the TRaSh-80 and Apple II had just
been released around that time).  We had to make do in the Santa Barbara
Unified School District with a Nova 2/10 and one 300-bd terminal (remember
those lovely Teletype machines--the ones with paper tape readers? 8-)
per school (three high schools, four junior high schools).  With 35
students in the class, forty-five minutes per day, this meant that each
student had roughly seven minutes of terminal time per week in a given
class.

The instructor made up for this by teaching us the basics of Boolean
Algebra and deductive logic.  I found this to be the most valuable
class that I had taken in secondary school, for its applications were
not limited to just CS or even science.

One problem that had arisen is that there are, to my knowledge, no
books on mathematical logic or descrete math written with a high school
student in mind that is currently in print.  The book that we used
had been out of print since 1964; the teacher bought his own copies,
and we were not allowed to take them out of class.

> 	Instead the high school course needs to be greatly modified.  
> A competent teacher being paid a livable salary has to teach the course.
> (The 'livable salary' part puts the high school course beyond the means
> of most school systems since schools pay abysmally low salaries to their
> teachers).  

It is my feeling in general that teachers in general should be paid
as much as engineers and chemists; then again, I don't know of any
public school district that could possibly afford this and maintain
a proper physical plant and procure adequate learning materials and
resources (books, computers, etc.) at the same time.

> 	The bottom line:  if the course can't be taught well, then don't
> teach it.  

Agreed.

> Henry C. Mensch  |  User Confuser | Purdue University User Services

--Nick Cuccia
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