"you may be surprised how many coders of my vintage first learned to code by tying in QBASIC games from a magazine, or using “view source”."
Reminds me of when I first got into coding :) I "stole" pretty websites' source codes and played with them on Notepad, changing things around like the background images or playing with the font weight and div properties. That really made learning more effective and fun for me, though at the time my only real motivation was: I just wanted a cool website of my own!! Little did I know it would be the seed that grew into my continued interest in programming/computer science as I went into high school and college.
Good stuff. Yes, LLMs as a complete replacement for existing programming languages seems challenging because human language is necessarily ambiguous. We don't always know exactly what we mean. Computer languages have unintentional ambiguity (C++ undefined behavior, anyone?) but more limited in scope. Defining the problem and iterating on it seems to be an essential component that humans will continue to be useful for.
+1 for Andy Pavlo's database course (CS 15-445). I'm working through it now. So awesome with the publicly available Autograder, GitHub repo, and Discord channel.
+1 for the Kurose networking lectures. I watched all of those. Kurose has a gift for making the complex simple. His book doesn't have a lot of projects, however, so there's an opportunity for adding value.
I also enjoy Apollo history. I've got Failure Is Not An Option on my shelf, but haven't made time to dig into it. If you haven't played with https://apolloinrealtime.org/ check it out. Amazing. I'll check out your podcast episode.
Yes, I'm looking for a good AI math tutor as well. We, too, were a bit disappointed by Khanmigo. It sometimes gave wrong answers and the anti-cheating mechanism was more friction than help. I'll check out Synthesis Tutor.
Generally yes, although we also just drift around a bit based on mood/interest, e.g. the challenges might feel like a drag for a bit so we switch to a more creative block-based project
We use laptops for most, sometimes iPads if there's a lot of drag/drop activity. Regarding "wandering off on the internet" it's just never been a problem, there's usually an adult sitting next to or near them anyway
"you may be surprised how many coders of my vintage first learned to code by tying in QBASIC games from a magazine, or using “view source”."
Reminds me of when I first got into coding :) I "stole" pretty websites' source codes and played with them on Notepad, changing things around like the background images or playing with the font weight and div properties. That really made learning more effective and fun for me, though at the time my only real motivation was: I just wanted a cool website of my own!! Little did I know it would be the seed that grew into my continued interest in programming/computer science as I went into high school and college.
A very common story!
Good stuff. Yes, LLMs as a complete replacement for existing programming languages seems challenging because human language is necessarily ambiguous. We don't always know exactly what we mean. Computer languages have unintentional ambiguity (C++ undefined behavior, anyone?) but more limited in scope. Defining the problem and iterating on it seems to be an essential component that humans will continue to be useful for.
+1 for Andy Pavlo's database course (CS 15-445). I'm working through it now. So awesome with the publicly available Autograder, GitHub repo, and Discord channel.
+1 for the Kurose networking lectures. I watched all of those. Kurose has a gift for making the complex simple. His book doesn't have a lot of projects, however, so there's an opportunity for adding value.
I also enjoy Apollo history. I've got Failure Is Not An Option on my shelf, but haven't made time to dig into it. If you haven't played with https://apolloinrealtime.org/ check it out. Amazing. I'll check out your podcast episode.
Yes, I'm looking for a good AI math tutor as well. We, too, were a bit disappointed by Khanmigo. It sometimes gave wrong answers and the anti-cheating mechanism was more friction than help. I'll check out Synthesis Tutor.
Keep up the amazing work!
For Codemonkey are you doing things sequentially starting from Codemonkey Jr?
Generally yes, although we also just drift around a bit based on mood/interest, e.g. the challenges might feel like a drag for a bit so we switch to a more creative block-based project
Thanks for sharing all this. Please keep it up!
Oz, what kind of device your kids use for Codemonkey and such? What software do you have there to prevents kids from wandering on the internet?
We use laptops for most, sometimes iPads if there's a lot of drag/drop activity. Regarding "wandering off on the internet" it's just never been a problem, there's usually an adult sitting next to or near them anyway