How Programmable Calculators and a Sci-Fi Story Brought Soviet Teens Into the Digital

[Thomas Okken]

(10-20-2020 07:25 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  I might agree with that part about computer literacy, but not about computer science, and definitely not about computer engineering. I occasionally get people involved in teaching kids about "coding" who want to partner with me because of my website; but I have to tell them that when they're giving the kids GUIs with drag-and-drop programming components (the word "programming" being used quite loosely), the student is not given any understanding whatsoever about what goes on under the hood, and that I don't want to be involved in that kind of "education."

I agree. I once had a disconcerting experience while studying math in college. I was helping a fellow student with a C programming assignment and I ran into a brick wall trying to explain pointers. This student seemed to grasp most of the language, but drew a complete blank on that key concept, and I didn't manage to get it across, and I just couldn't understand how something so basic could be so hard...

But then again, my own computer journey had started with assembly language programming. It was actually a bit like the Soviet experience, in that I had the course book but no actual computer to run anything on. But thinking about the 8080 CPU and the way it fetches instructions from memory, and what the various instructions can do, that led me to a kind of thinking that has stood me in good stead ever since.