Julie in Monterey Posted March 30, 2016 Share Posted March 30, 2016 Hi, I am working on planning 8th grade next year and I've decided to drop all traditional science for computer science next year. We've been heavy on the traditional sciences in the past and my daughter will be attending a college prep high school 9-12th grade. Ironically, they do not offer any computer science courses until senior year so I want to spend the next year getting my girl engaged and excited about computer science. It should be noted that I don't know a thing about it. I plan to learn right along side of her so I'm not thrilled by the idea of only on-line like Khan Academy. I would love to have recommendations for a sequential learning plan. I feel like there is so much "experiential" learning out there that we can't actually get down to the business of doing anything. My hope is after this year, so can have a solid foundation and start to self educate on this topic. We can do dual enrollment at a community college but I don't want it to be too hard and scare her off. We can start in the summer as well. Does anyone have any ideas? We can dedicate lots of time to it. On-line? Local? Tutor? Programming languages? What's first? Any and all help/advise would so very appreciated! Julie in Monterey Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie in Monterey Posted March 30, 2016 Author Share Posted March 30, 2016 I cross posted on High School board. These are some recommendations I am initially going with. general computer science intro - the stanford online class CS101 (free)- I registered for this class this morning. I plan to take this prior to my daughter taking it. web development - using CodeAcademy.com (free)- we started this last year. I will look at it again. The issue with code academy is they have many courses so I've been overwhelmed in the past about which one to take. programming - python - using learnpythonthehardway.org's online book (free)- plan to check this out. We started Python on CodeAcademy last year as well. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrSmith Posted March 30, 2016 Share Posted March 30, 2016 I have no actual recommendation but I thought I'd mention something. There's theory and practice to CS. Theoretical CS is all math and is pretty boring unless you know you are going to do CS for a living. Practical CS is mostly programming and that can be interesting. But you need the boring background and math first. In HS I would recommend to focus on the practical side to avoid burn out (did I mention CS is boring?). 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EmilyGF Posted March 30, 2016 Share Posted March 30, 2016 I think most CS majors I know started with hands-on programming. You need (?) linear algebra to do theoretical CS, and I don't think theoretical CS makes much sense without some programming. I think I'd do the CodeAcademy program at 30 min/day or something and make a road-map through it. Or you could do Python or Java through Coursera. But I'd say hold off on "computer science" for a while. Emily Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daijobu Posted April 2, 2016 Share Posted April 2, 2016 Python is a great first language. Do you like learning from books? Try Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, and go about halfway through the book, through the intro to object oriented programming. You can take your time and go at your own pace. Good luck! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SanDiegoMom Posted April 4, 2016 Share Posted April 4, 2016 Ghf online has a computer science concepts course. It's EXTREMELY versatile- and the ages range from upper elementary (my son) to upper high school. The concepts are higher level concepts but Ms Whitson offers alternate assignments for Students who understand the concepts but aren't ready to program them yet. You can use Scratch or Python, and she offers office hours every Friday for three hours to pair program homework assignments or anything else s student is working on. My son (10) loves the class, and while he is not ready to program some of the more complex concepts, I feel like this is a great 1st pass through before he goes back again and has the skills to code. For instance, one class was on sorting and the different methods you can program something to be sorted. (I know nothing about programming- just what I've been watching ds do). So my son could program a single bubble sort in scratch, when the next assignment was to sort three different lists of numbers with two different sorting methods and have a comparison of which one was better- he opted to take a video of himself sorting the lists of numbers on scraps of paper and comparing the tallies. So awesome to have that flexibility! Aops also has a programming course. I think done others on the board have had students take it. Maybe MIT-OCW? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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