Is This Really Necessary?
I was very excited by today’s announcement that the Khan Academy is going to start offering programming courses—until I read the whole post. I’m not a fan of today’s universities, but this is an undeserved smear:
The desire to learn and understand can be a powerful accelerant for students and it’s something that is completely missing from almost all Computer Science education.
I’d really like to see the data behind that claim, but I strongly suspect there isn’t any. I also have some serious reservations about this:
I think that JavaScript, and specifically learning how to code in-browser, is inherently a better way of learning. Reducing the complexity of getting started down to zero will result in more people learning. Additionally the ubiquity of JavaScript only serves to educate people in a language that will be generally useful.
Possibly. On the other hand, JavaScript has a lot of gotchas—more, I believe, than Python, Scheme, or Logo [1]. Have they done any work to find out whether JavaScript’s ubiquity and being able to code without installing anything on the desktop outweighs that complexity? Again, I strongly suspect the answer is “no”.
Long story short, what KA is doing is genuinely cool. I just think it would be cooler without the spin.
[1] Ironically, John Resig is famous in part for creating a library to hide some of those gotchas from run-of-the-mill developers (like me).
Yes, the first bit sounds very much like a marketing claim. It’s certainly true of some CS teaching, but “almost all” sounds like wild exaggeration.
For the second bit though, I think I agree. Javascript certainly does have a lot of gotchas – however it’s also one of the few languages where students can very quickly start doing interesting stuff. With Python, there’s a lot to learn before you can do stuff like UI or graphics – whereas with Javascript, that’s where they start.
@Simon But my point is, they don’t know (any more than you or I) whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. It seems a little crazy that people who talk so much about the power of learning analytics would make such a large decision without any data to back it up.
“Ironically, John Resig is famous in part for creating a library to hide some of those gotchas from run-of-the-mill developers (like me).”
that’s actually not true. jQuery hides cross-browser DOM gotchas, not javascript gotchas. they are different, related but separate things.