Mark Guzdial at ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) writes:
I have three reasons for thinking that learning CS is different than learning other STEM disciplines.
- Our infrastructure for teaching CS is younger, smaller, and weaker;
- We don't realize how hard learning to program is;
- CS is so valuable that it changes the affective components of learning.
The author makes compelling arguments to support the claims, ending with:
We are increasingly finding that the emotional component of learning computing (e.g., motivation, feeling of belonging, self-efficacy) is among the most critical variables. When you put more and more students in a high-pressure, competitive setting, and some of whom feel "like" the teacher and some don't, you get emotional complexity that is unlike any other STEM discipline. Not mathematics, any of the sciences, or any of the engineering disciplines are facing growing numbers of majors and non-majors at the same time. That makes learning CS different and harder.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:57PM
I bet it is almost 18 years since the first guy got a mindstorm responding to pings (look for mindstorm ping in a search engine for the details).
Of course that was all his custom IP stack could do...but at the time it was cool because typically getting anything that small online was not really possible. They were peripherals, dependent on a master/controller. Even though it was tethered, that had to be the first mindstorm on the net that responded by itself.
The IoT of today may have been born back then! But his is arguably more secure because it couldnt do more than what he could get it to do. Now our stuff does way more than many of us want.