[Edu-sig] Articles of possible interest

[Greg Ward]

On 27 April 2000, Dorothea Salo said:
> 	I have been lurking for a while on edu-sig, and have read its
> archive, so of course I was pleased to see the article. I found myself
> reacting rather strongly to it, and have written up my observations and
> placed them on the Web.
> 
> 	I decided not to bring them forward here because a) I am a total
> edu-sig newbie, b) some of my observations are tangential to CP4E, and c)
> most, if not all, of my observations are rather polemical.

I think the only good reason *not* to post your response to Guido's
article is that it's a bit long.  Any newbie who's read the archive
should feel free to post; fresh voices are always welcome in any forum.
(Well, except for outliers like alt.2600 or alt.sysadmin.recovery -- but
never mind...)  I wouldn't call your observations "tangential" to CP4E;
they're not *quite* "utterly crucial" or "absolutely central" but they
are sure close.  And yes, your article is polemical, but it's about 95%
spot-on.

So I will quote liberally from your article and see how much I agree
with you.  (A lot.)

> So, what are the little nippers up to, according to van Rossum? Let's
> see:
> 
>      "We walk up to two girls in the back of the class who are busy
>      debugging a Barbie dress-up game used as an exercise."
> 
> Excuse me while I barf. Do people really wonder why women aren't
> hackers?

Yeah, I just about barfed there too.  Guido, what *WERE* you
thinking?!?!?  I am no big fan of "political correctness", but this
particular example was just plain dumb.

However, I would argue that the other example -- the boys were doing
some 3-D graphics thing -- was almost as dumb.  (If the boys were
designing a latter-day DOOM wad file, it would have been just as dumb.
Girls play with dolls, boys play at killing, and that's the way the
world is, right?  I sure hope not...)

> Let us examine Eric S. Raymond for a moment, as long as I'm making
> myself universally hated by going after sacred cows. His "How to Become
> a Hacker" guide has a slightly unsettling bit:
> 
>       "There are even growing numbers of people who realize that
>       hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material. For
>       more on this, see Girl's Guide to Geek Guys

I can't defend Guido's howler, but I think Eric's statement is
defensible on a couple of grounds: first, there really are a lot more
male geeks or hackers than female; second, there really is a web page
called "The Girl's Guide to Geek Guys"; third, that web page is (at
least partly) satirical.

Personally, I'd love to see a Guide to Geek Girls, preferably with an
emphasis on where to *find* them.  There sure don't seem to be many on
the Python-related lists I follow.  Is this a failure of the educational
system? of geek culture? of the silent mass of geek girls to take part
in technical mailing lists? or are they out there, but masquerading
under male names so they don't get buried by sleazy email propositions?
(BTW, does that kind of crap still happen, or have people -- err, men on
the Internet -- grown up a little bit yet?)

[Dorothea's suggestions for what the girls in Guido's mythical CP4E
 class could be doing]
>   They might be making interactive web pages; that's the obvious answer. 
> 
>   They might be writing and optimizing a search engine, though
>   that might be a little advanced for middle school.
> 
>   They might be writing a program that produces all the forms of a
>   Spanish verb given the infinitive (for extra credit-or perhaps as an
>   extension written later in the year-the program should correctly
>   handle stem-changing verbs and irregular
>   first-person-singular-indicative forms).
> 
>   They might be working on speech synthesis, and gaining a solid
>   experiential understanding of English orthography, phonetics, and
>   phonology in the process.
> 
>   They might be programming a sentence generator, and refining it so
>   that it does not generate syntactically unacceptable English
>   sentences.  (Forget sentence diagramming-what an utter waste that is!)
> 
>   The 2003 version of my old middle-school theatre crowd might be
>   programming a theatre lighting system that reacts to the sound of
>   particular lines, or coming up with a text-manipulation program to
>   help directors decide where to cut lines in plays that are running
>   long.

Cool!  Can I take your class instead of Guido's?  I'm definitely a text
person myself, and I don't think I'm the only one.  Thing is, 3-D
graphics -- whether it's designing a VR world or blowing evil monsters
to smithereens -- looks cool and attracts the interest of non-techies.
Alice is *just* *plain* *cool*, even though I'm not all that interested
in VR myself.

But to limit the universe of "interesting things" for students to do
with computers to 3-D graphics is folly.  Text is indeed cool, and
getting more interesting all the time.  Am I the only one with a minor
fetish for Unicode glyphs?  That stuff is *neat*!

        Greg