Resources: Software Carpentry

Audrey, at Hack Education, has a nice post up on Software Carpentry and paths forward.

Software Carpentry is not a site I'd seen before. I've been saying, my theme, has been that there are more low-level resources out there then people know. My claim is that the problem is higher up, linking students to what they in particular need at a particular time.

That said, I think Software Carpentry has a pretty good high-level structure. In fact, their game plan is very much like my own, in my sidebar. It might be a little less a roadmap, but it covers the same bases, and does have tutorials for each step along the way. My approach, you remember, was to teach the meta-skill to "google bash scripting" or whatever, rather than to try to write it or own it ...

Anyway, Software Carpentry looks to be a good solid resource.

Study Groups

Here's a neat report, via Adafruit Blog:

Every week at a kitchen table in Brooklyn, coders Amit Pitaru and David Nolen host a salon/workshop called Kitchen Table Coders, bringing together a small group of people to discuss and study one subject at a time.

The photo looks very Community ;-)

Alternate Paths: O'Reilly School

Their blurb is:

Earn Your IT Certificate in 2012

Only with online courses from the O'Reilly School of Technology can you master in-demand IT development skills by using programming to learn programming.

It looks pretty good with a wide range of courses.

The front page is here: O'Reilly School of Technology. Check it out. I think I might, actually, for a little refresh on technologies I haven't used in a while.

Lectures Don't Work

The full article is worth a read:

Science Finds a Better Way to Teach Science

The basic idea is that students who put knowledge to immediate use remember it better. I guess that's not a surprise to those of us who prefer internet tutorials to dry lectures. It might even be a defense of my "go do it" method in the sidebar.

If you have a game plan, google for answers, and build a LAMP server, you'll learn a lot.

Alternate Paths: Udacity

Felix Salmon has a really great report on the Stanford AI experiment:

Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online — he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students. Thrun scrambled to put together a website which could scale and support that enrollment, and succeeded spectacularly well. Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.

He follows with news of a new venture:

But that’s not the announcement that Thrun gave. Instead, he said, he concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udacity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a search engine — and of course it’s all going to be free.

Looking out there now, I see a couple computer science courses. This could shape up well.

Alternate Paths: Raspberry Pi

In my sidebar I recommend using an old abandoned computer to learn the LAMP stack.  If you, friends, or family, have such a computer sitting around, it's obviously the cheapest path.

The Raspberry Pi is a very similar and low cost alternative.  As Roy Wood reports:

The Raspberry Pi system is a single-board computer based on the Broadcom BCM2835 system-on-a-chip. The specs include a 700MHZ ARM CPU, a VideoCore IV GPU, up to 256MB of RAM, an SD card reader, USB ports, and an optional ethernet port. The device supports common USB peripherals like mice and keyboards, can be connected to a TV or monitor, and will run Debian Linux. Oh — and did I mention that a Pi will cost a mere $25 or $35, depending on the model?

The Pi is just entering production. It is an alternative, but might be a little tight on memory, compared to the typical disused closet PC.

Alternate Paths: Code Year

Code Year is a very interesting concept. It is a promise to send "a lesson a week" by the Codecademy folks. They don't give too much more info, do they? ;-)

I'd guess that it is a JavaScript-first programming path, based on Codecademy lessons.  As I mention on in my JavaScript page, Codecademy does have many happy users.

So if you like the JavaScript path, and weekly emails sound like the structure you prefer, go for it!

(Hat Tip Red Sweater Blog)