Slides from the presentations of the Google Education Summit

The Google Education Summit took place this summer. A group of leaders in computer science education, with representatives from academia, NSF, CRA (Computing Research Association), IBM, Intel, and Microsoft, met to discuss how undergraduate studies in computer science can be promoted.

Now they have published all the presentations under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

More info about the summit by its organizer, Mehran Sahami, a Google research scientist and Associate Professor (Teaching) at Stanford U.

Publicado Real Decreto de "Ordenación" de las Enseñanzas Universitarias

RD-27-10-2007

Primeras palabras del RD:

"La progresiva armonización de los sistemas universitarios exigida por el proceso de construcción del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior, iniciado en 1999 con la Declaración de Bolonia y la consiguiente interacción operada entre tales sistemas por las diversas normativas nacionales sucesivamente promulgadas, ha dotado de una dimensión y de una agilidad sin precedentes al proceso de cambio emprendido por las universidades europeas. "

Una de las principales novedades es que pasamos de títulos de 3 años a títulos de 4 años. Pero, según el profesor Carabaña, esto precisamente va en contra de la pretendida armonización:

"La historia oficial del proceso de Bolonia comienza en 1998, más de cincuenta años después de que la unión de Europa echara a andar. Los cuatro países más importantes de la UE, Alemania, Francia, Italia y Gran Bretaña tienen sistemas universitarios muy distintos. Sus ministros de Educación, reunidos en París, para intentar armonizarlos. Alemania e Italia tienen solamente títulos largos, 'títulos túnel' sin salidas intermedias. Gran Bretaña y Francia tienen en cambio títulos de todas las longitudes. Acuerdan que Italia y Alemania introduzcan también títulos cortos, de modo que las enseñanzas de los cuatro países sigan una estructura con ciclos de tres y cinco años, amén del doctorado."

¿Tú lo entiendes?

Impressive way of teaching computer science

A video, From Nand to Tetris in 12 steps, from an israeli professor explaining the innovative way they teach computer science, bottom up: from NAND gates to a whole functional computer. Don't miss the book and GPL SW material. Read the video abstract:

We describe a new approach and a course that aims to demystify the integrated function ... todos » of computer systems, using a hands-on approach. The course presents many abstractions, algorithms, and data structures learned in CS courses, and makes them concrete by building a complete computer system from the ground up. In particular, we guide the students through a modular series of projects that gradually construct and unit-test a simple hardware platform and a modern software hierarchy, yielding a surprisingly powerful computer system.

The hardware projects are done in a simple hardware description language and a hardware simulator supplied by us. The software projects (assembler, VM, and a compiler for a simple object-based language) can be done in any language, using the APIs and test programs supplied by us. We also build a mini-OS. The result is a GameBoy-like computer, simulated on the student's PC. We start the course (and this talk) by demonstrating some video games running on this computer, e.g. Tetris and Pong.

Building a working computer from Nand gates alone is a thrilling intellectual exercise. It demonstrates the supreme power of recursive ascent, and teaches the students that building computer systems is -- more than anything else -- a triumph of human reasoning. We are able to squeeze all this into a single course since we deal with neither efficiency nor advanced features, leaving these subjects to other courses in the program. The resulting approach is completely self-contained, requiring only programming as a pre-requisite. Hence, courses based on the approach can be given at almost any stage in a CS program.

Scot Aaronson on Teaching Undergraduate Computer Science

Anyone who has attended a lecture in university has met professors who do not want or like to teach. If they did, they would do a better job of it. Scott Aaronson's teaching statement declares explicitly what his Quantum Computing lectures show: that he is an an amazing researcher and first-rate thinker while still being able to teach at undergraduate levels. Maybe you can't be such an amazing researcher, or maybe you already are, but you could do worse than to try and be as good a teacher as he is:

My basic proposal is to sing the ideas of theoretical computer science from the rooftops—by creating new undergraduate courses, training graduate students, helping talented undergraduates reach the research frontier, blogging, and writing popular books and articles.

Read the rest of the proposal, where Scott puts forward such heresies as teaching theoretical computer science as a liberal arts course, raising the undergraduate teaching ceiling to the level where it reaches "the research frontier", modernising the curriculum towards that frontier ("instead of showing twenty NP-completeness reductions, why not show two reductions, and then spend the rest of the time talking about pseudorandom generators, Primes in P, natural proofs, or quantum computing?"), having his students prove non-obvious theorems instead of just the obvious ones, and rewarding intellectual honesty (and, conversely, punishing dishonesty) in a way that I wish were done more often, even to me, when I was studying.

Now go read it, it's only four pages long, and it will make you feel better about the world.