In a few weeks new college freshmen will begin their classes. Some of them will choose to pursue a degree in Computer Science. Over the course of the four years in college they will be surrounded by like minded people who are at least as smart as they are and are just as interested in computers. When they enter the job market they will compete … Continue reading What Every College Computer Science Freshman Should Know
Techcrunch reports: If 17-year-old Google is at all worried that it’s losing its mojo, it should find some new data highly reassuring. According to a survey of 19,000 students across 340 universities around the world, Google is still their top choice when asked where they’d want to work. Their other top picks, in descending order: Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon … Continue reading Attracting STEM Graduates to Traditional Enterprise IT
I wrote in January that computers might have become too complicated to be used effectively for teaching kids how to program. I learned how to program on a very simple computer that had BASIC as the only way to interact with it; even to load a game I had to know how to type in a command. As I look back at my early computer … Continue reading Thanking MIT Scratch
I learned computer programming on a Cold War era Soviet programmable calculator called Elektronika MK-61. It was a very simple device that used a four element calculation stack, a handful of registers, and programming it was very much like writing assembler code. It had a number of undocumented features that made simple games possible. It’s cousin MK-52 was used as an on board computer on … Continue reading Have computers become too complicated for teaching ?
