Unit Testing in Education
In my readings of Extreme Programming, one thing I’m struggling to pick up on is Unit Testing. Mostly, it’s the pain of writing tests for each thing I can imagine goes wrong. Partly it’s an imaginary horror: I think about…
The Progress Phallus
My friend Ray runs numerical simulations and wanted to have a decent progress bar for his code. A bit of web searching revealed some code, that takes care of this automatically. However, we thought that an ordinary progress bar is…
Documentation for Progress
I’ve noticed in my work recently that documenting my work is one of the most reliable ways of making steady progress. I likely gathered the idea from the internet somewhere, or perhaps from the generous amounts of advice spewed forth…
The Modern Library
I’d like to say some things about what I think a sacred, but overlooked, and dwindling institution can do to revitalize itself in the day of the information superhighway. First, let’s get something straight. People have had the opportunity to…
Redesigning a CS Curriculum
A number of my posts over the last couple of weeks have concerned education and curriculum. I met with a couple of the educators here at UCI, to go over these points. I’d like to record these thoughts before they…
Homoiconic Dichotomy and Interactive Publications
Both Linguistics and Computer Science have some concern about the difference between form and meaning. This difference is usually introduced in a syntax vs semantics lecture. I would like to show that it actually occurs in a wide variety of…
Machine Learning – Coarse to Fine
Because a friend of mine posted it on Facebook, I ended up watching this video, How Artificial Intelligence Learns From Biological Intelligence (by Evan Ehrenberg) that discusses some introductory machine learning topics. Along the way, the narrator mentioned that children…
The Future of Publishing should be Skribilo
Finally, I found something that looks like it could suitably replace LaTeX! It’s called Skribilo and features all of the goodness observed in a previous post about using a Lisp-like syntax instead of that crufty HTML/XML nonsense.
Education Includes Personal Growth
I think there is a trend among the students who perform poorly in class, but fail to show up to office hours to get assistance: I believe they might be suffering from poor study skills. Now, because they don’t show…
Student-Derived Metrics
I’m still reading the Standards for Our Schools book. I don’t have a rigorous background in literature about learning and education, but what I see so far indicates that incorporating standards into education is analogous to incorporating evidence into your…