February 2012
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Programming Trade School

I think that the education of my fellow countrymen would be better served not by a system of general education but by a plethora of specific and targeted trade and skills schools. To that end I wish to design a workable trade schools in building programming skills.

Organization

  • Will have teaser lectures about some concepts on YouTube.
  • Rest of the class will be sold as a package deal (neighborhood of $300), work at your own pace.
  • For targeted, intense, learning, visit the campus (actually a hotel I purchased with rooms decked out for pair programming. Got the hotel idea from Tom of SOLE).
  • Have affiliations with companies that guarantee our top students good jobs. (these companies are effectively outsourcing the recruitment and training to us.) Can also function as a talent agency, doing a psych profile about what area (embedded, systems, web, etc.) fits each student best, and matching them up to available company positions. [Steve Kurti -- 111120]
  • If the curriculum is a sequence of classes, have entrance exams, and never have an exit exam determine the grade (even better not to have grades). Goal is to get the teacher to take the role of XP coach or a player on the student’s team; grades make the student/teacher relationship too adversarial.
  • Can also function as a job placement agency. Assessing student skills and matching them to employers. If you can pitch it the idea to the companies, perhaps they can subsidize enough, through kick-backs, so that tuition becomes free. [Alex Thornton -- 120112] That solves the problem of lower income viewing education as a cost rather than investment.
  • Online instruction allows for a collection of ‘advanced topics’ skills-based tricks-of-the trade, rules-of-thumb for (a) distributed computing (b) heuristics development for search/indexing/query processing (c) data management/updating (d) etc… Will assume competency in programming, student only wants to know a particular kind of development.

Cirriculum

  • A two-year program culminating in a compiler construction class. See “How Compiler Construction remains Relevant” in the blog.
  • Must focus each class on building one piece of a portfolio of work, that demonstrates the student knows their stuff, and which can be used to obtain a job (advertise oneself) (Wallingford agrees)
  • Should we do a work-study program: can be good to sideline as a job placement agency.

The compiler course must integrate all of the following elements:

  • testing
  • XP practices
  • Debugging techniques
  • Refactorings (Iterative design by extending underlying language. ex. by adding lexically scoped variables)
  • Design Patterns (Decorator, Visitor, Composite)
  • Demonstrates the memory model explicitly (stack vs heap)

Materials

Educational Philosophy

  • Incorporates learning psychology into a practice of XP.
  • Assignments include motivation of design patterns and abstraction, before each specific one is introduced. Motivate the problem, discuss possible solutions, then collectively arrive at the wisdom in the book.
  • Engagement through the planning game, generating performance metrics, self-assessment, perhaps competition.

We learn by:

  • practicing
  • discussion, analysis, evaluation of alternatives
  • working in pairs (XP-style)
  • ESR, How to become a hacker
  • not lecturing: 20 reasons why.
  • todo: read Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools, by Roger Schank.

Founded on principles in the field of Mind, Brain and Education.

Fortunately, research is available to help parents, teachers and school administrators do just that. In recent years, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and educational psychologists have made a series of remarkable discoveries about how the human brain learns. They have founded a new discipline, known as Mind, Brain and Education, that is devoted to understanding and improving the ways in which children absorb, retain and apply knowledge.

Promotion

Bootstrapping:

  1. job placement agency. Who’s hiring what languages? what other skills do they need? lang + skills -→ target employers. have lunch with headhunter; hr reps and ask what they are looking for.
  2. then build cirriculum. which targets exactly that.
  3. Look also at government funding initiatives (as well as private and corporate philanthropy); but don’t accept money with strings attached.
  4. Participate in a Tech Coast Angel competition
  5. Investigate funding from: Donald Bren, Bill + Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation. These guys are interested in promoting education.