“Mission: Help scientists be more productive by teaching them basic computing skills”
The mission sounds good. Sums things up quite nicely. I was wondering, what do scientists get from increased productivity? More time doing science? Fewer hours at the office/lab? Mission: show scientists how to be better programmers so they can spend more time

“The problem is that scientists spend 40% of their time wrestling with software”
“The problem is that 95% of them are self taught”
These sound more like statistics, but yeah—it’s pretty easy to make the connection to problems.
The problem is that scientists waste time wrestling with software because they don’t have the right training. Sort of like programming the time on a VCR without reading the manual—you’ll get it done, but it’s slow an painful (I’m old—I can refer to things like VRCs)

“Take too long, build things that are already build, don’t know how to verify correctness”
This one hits the nail on the head. There are three parts: time, duplication, correctness. Would most scientists view all three as must-fix? Or would one or more be nice-to-fix?

“Solution: short, intensive workshops with self paced online learning”
Where do I sign up!

“Benefit: more confidence in results + higher productivity”
Correctness was left out of this slide. If your value prop is 1. time 2. duplication 3. correctness, does it make sense to talk about correctness here too?

“Workshop offer the basics”
If they spend 40% of their time programming, do they already know the basics? What about: workshops offer best practices and must-know skills/tools.

“More depth online”
This one sounded like more breadth online.

Cool video. If you put more cats in it, you’ll probably get more views…

1) Think algorithmically

2) ?

3) Profit!

But I assume that there is more to her ideas that. I think her Mozilla talk is going to be rescheduled, so maybe we’ll get to hear more.

Thanks for the link to Wing’s paper. Her computational thinking comes across as graduate-level stuff to me: advanced intellectual tools for success in a world dominated by computation. Where Davidson’s algorithmic thinking sounds more like a fundamental critical thinking skill for the masses.

fully agree! So, good to mention the original intention from time to time.

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Right. Technology isn’t magic – it won’t solve your problems simply by virtue of being technology. It’s just a tool, opening up new ways for *people* to solve problems. Or to cause problems, for that matter – technology has no particular preference over how it’s used…

And on that, it seems that most tools are either drawing-oriented or text-oriented; one of the reasons I still use PowerPoint is that it seems to strike a good balance between the two (although that could just be familiarity).