Chapman Kids Blog

"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

Year: 2013 Page 11 of 16

How to teach computer programming to kids (Part 1) Introduction

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On Thursday, April 11, 2013

In Education, Homeschool, Software, Technology

Day 598 of 1000

This is the first in a series of posts on how we taught our children to program, what we did wrong and how we think we could have done better.  You can see the introductory post and index to the series by clicking here.

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We have two children.  Christian was very interested learning to program at a young age.  Kelly was not interested at all.  We systematically taught Christian how to program as part of his homeschool curriculum so that he was able to get an summer internship as a programmer by the time he was 15.  Even though he has sound programming skills, looking back, we think we could have done a better job.  Kelly, even though she was disinterested, would have benefited greatly from some computer programming instruction.   This series describes what we did well, what we did poorly, and our idea of what we would do if we had to do it over.

We started to teach Christian to program when he was about 11 years old.  He actually worked on some operating system stuff both for PC’s and his Palm Pilot before that.  Kelly did not start to learn programming until she was 18 (this year) in SAS and Java courses at college with the exception of some work with the R statistical programming language last summer.  We think we did a good job with Christian and a horrible job with Kelly even though she is turning into a pretty good programmer.  Christan is a proficient programmer in a number of languages including C#, C/C++, Python, Java, and assembly language.  He completed one fairly impressive project, a couple of medium size projects, and is currently at work on a technical assembly language program as part of an undergraduate research in Electrical Engineering.  Even though Kelly does not want to program for a living, as a statistician, she has seen she needs programming as a skill that will help her.  She is pretty unhappy that we did not at least give her some of the basics.

The following is a list of posts I plan to make.  The list will probably morph a little as I progress and grow to as long as it needs to be.

Christian at the Spring 2013 NCSU Undergraduate Research Symposium

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On Wednesday, April 10, 2013

In Education, Software, Technology

Day 597 of 1000

Christian at the Spring 2013 NCSU Undergraduate Research SymposiumChristian dressed up today to go to the McKimmon Center at NCSU to show off a poster he made for the Spring 2013 Undergraduate Research Symposium. He made the poster for his work at NCSU’s Optical Sensing Laboratory where he is designing, building, and characterizing a Black Body Source for infrared camera and spectrophotometer calibration under the Tutelage of Dr. Michael Kudenov.  I think Christian was a little nervous when the thing got started, but he texted me that a lot of his buddies were there with him, doing the same thing.

Christian did not really have much to show because this is the first semester of a two semester project.  He is just getting started building the device and has programmed (in assembly language) some basic functionality into it.  When we get back from California at the first of June, Christian will devote about six hours per day to this project until it is complete.  He hopes to be able to present some good data and a manual that explains how to build and use the device.  The big deal about what he is doing is not so much about what it does, but what it does for less than $1000.  I am looking forward to seeing how this all turns out.

Advice from a liberal arts professor to a liberal arts major

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On Tuesday, April 9, 2013

In General

I talked to the desk clerk a little bit when I got back to my hotel tonight.  She seems like a very nice girl.  I asked her if she was in school.

She said “Yes, in college.”

I said, “At Prescott College?”  Prescott College is a very liberal, liberal arts college here in the middle of conservative Prescott.

She said, “No, only rich kids can go there.  I go to the community college because I am paying my own way.”

“That’s great!  What are you studying?”

“Anthropology.  I plan to go to NAU when I finish at the community college.”

I asked, “Where do you want to work when finish?”

“I am not sure.  My professors tell me that I doesn’t matter so much which degree I get.  It is just important that I get a degree because the people who do the hiring will know you have been able to stick to something for four years.”

What she is doing is really admirable.  She is working her way through the community college, then plans to go to a pretty good regional university.   She will save lots of money that way.  She will be in much better shape than others who take out big loans to go to an expensive liberal arts school to get a soft degree like Anthropology.  Jobs are hard to come by these days for Anthropology majors.  Still, she will have four years experience in the hotel business, definitely not a bad thing.  I think in her case the education and experience she gets in her job will be more valuable than anything she gets from the college course she has chosen.  It is a shame though, that her teachers are representing that a soft degree is something that is somehow viewed as valuable to the vast bulk of employers.

Teacher resigns for a lot the wrong reasons and a few right ones

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On Tuesday, April 9, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

There is a resignation letter in an article in the Washington Post from a government school teacher to a high school in Syracuse, New York.  The teacher has some interesting things to say about being forced into a corner with respect to how he is required to teach by governmental regulations.  It is an interesting letter, not so much because I think it is right on all the particulars, but because he describes exactly how we felt when we pulled our children out of government school to start homeschooling.  Here is my favorite quote from the letter:

After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.

The issue was that the government school teachers taught our kids things we thought were wrong.  They were also very inefficient at teaching our kids the things we thought were right.  It seems like the chickens are coming home to roost.  There are lots more things to say, for instance, about STEM, worldviews, and grading, but I have said those things in many other posts over the years.

Comments are back!

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On Tuesday, April 9, 2013

In General

Day 596 of 1000

The comments are back up and running!  There were several that fell through the cracks and were lost, so if you have the time and inclination, please try to post them again.  I hope to start the series on how we taught programming to kids and why it is a good skill (like typing) to have even if you will never do it for a living.

More thoughts on teaching kids to program

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On Monday, April 8, 2013

In General

Day 595 of 1000

We are still struggling to figure out what is going on with our hosting service and today is a big day at work.  It looks like I have a new director level title, so that is kind of cool.  I really want to move on to the series of posts on how we taught Christian to program.  With the exception of some time spent in the R language, we did not work on programming with Kelly until she got to NCSU.  Last night, Kelly stayed up until 3:30am working on a Java program.  She really “gets” all the concepts, but the minutiae kills you.  I will add a section or two of what might be good preparation for programming at a later stage than Christian, but before going to college.

Problem with comments

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On Saturday, April 6, 2013

In General

All the comments have disappeared on the website.  I am working to get it going again.  I do not think it is possible to post right now.  I will post again when this is fixed.  You can write me an email at the address on the right column as needed.

Christian’s first undergraduate research poster

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On Saturday, April 6, 2013

In Education, Technology

Day 593 of 1000

Christian's undergraduate research posterChristian created the poster in the image to the right to describe his undergraduate research.  This is first of the two semester he will spend working on the project.  A poster is required for each semesters.  He will present the poster and describe his work for the poster at a symposium on Wednesday morning.  Here is the poster abstract:

Spectrophotometers and infrared cameras are widely used for non-contact temperature detection. These devices have been applied to manufacturing processes monitoring in industry Bnight or smoke vision systems for the police, firefighters, and military, and many other places. However, the sensors need to be calibrated to their surroundings to collect useful information. This calibration can be performed by metering the camera with respect to a light-absorbing surface with constant temerature and constant electromagnetic emissions.  This project involves building and testing a planar metering source for the described equipment which maintains enough temperature precision to allow accurate temeprature calibration while maintaining lowcost.

Kelly’s college experience so far: Helpful professors

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On Saturday, April 6, 2013

In Art, Education

Kelly's college prof's

Late in her toughest semester ever, Kelly draws a comic.  Late in his toughest semester ever, Christian comments on the comic on Facebook.

Why not skip high school? (Part 10) A full load a big state University

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On Friday, April 5, 2013

In General

Day 592 of 1000

This is the tenth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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The move to full time schedules from Community College to Big State U. (NCSU) was fairly straightforward.  The work loads were similar although the upper division classes the kids had to take were more difficult.  The single summer course each of the kids took was very helpful.  They knew how to get around campus, use the library, ride the buses, and all those other things you do not think about but that take time.  The kids felt for the confusion of many of the incoming Freshmen who had to get answers to all those questions at the same time the were carrying a full load of classes.

Socially, the kids at Big State U. seemed to be more immature than the students taking the hard classes at the Community College.  It surprised us at first, but, retrospectively, it makes some sense.  The students in the hard classes at the Community College were military veterans, people working a job, housewives, generally people who were older, had responsibility, and were paying their own way.  At Big State U. it was mostly kids only two years removed from the negative socialization of government high schools.

Kelly and Christian are different in the way they embrace the college experience.  Kelly, because she is so social, makes lots of friends, loves to study in groups, and participates in campus activities.  Sometimes this costs her.  She got into a little hole during the first semester and had to bury herself in the books with little time to sleep, exercise, or even eat for the last four weeks of her semester.  She did a truly amazing turn-around and got excellent grades her first full semester.  That lesson served her well in terms of managing her work load.

Christian, on the other hand, is totally focused on academics.  We worry that he does not get enough sleep because he is so focused on learning the material and getting great grades.  He has done well enough over his whole education that his expectations for great grades are something he has to manage carefully.

I write this series of posts with about a month left in the kids Junior year at NCSU.  Both of them are scheduled to graduate in May of 2014.  So far, they are both on the Dean’s List and have commitments from their academic advisers that if they finish their plans, they will graduate.  I will write a final post in the series when they graduate to let you know how that went.  Both the kids are planning on graduate school out west–I expect I will write a post or two on their efforts to get into good graduate schools, too.

Why not skip high school? (Part 9) Christian takes Chemistry at Big State U.

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On Thursday, April 4, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

Day 591 of 1000

This is the ninth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Christian’s first class at NCSU was Chemistry.  We really wanted Christian to get started the same way as Kelly.  We described in the previous post in this series how we put her in a single summer class to get her started at Big State U. (NCSU) when she started there.  We helped her choose a hard class called Foundations of Advanced Mathematics because we wanted her to get a feel for the difficulty of STEM classes at national research university and because it was the first class she needed for some future sequences.

The reasons to put Christian in the same class were the same as for Kelly, but we ran into a snag.  When we evaluated his whole program, we realized that he was going to have a pretty tough go at getting all his classes done in time to graduate in four years both because of the sequences he needed and because he did not have nearly as many credits as Kelly.  We described all the reasons for that in this post.  We got a little bit frantic, but figured out a way he could graduate on time.  The problem was that he would have to take a Chemistry class in the summer rather than the Foundations of Advanced Mathematics class.

That was all good and well, but there were two problems.  First, because the Foundations class would have to be put off until fall semester, Christian would have to take a very heavy load during spring semester (he is in that right now) so he will have the prerequisites for the classes he needs to take during his senior year to be able to graduate.  Second, he had to pass a test that showed that he had enough skills from previous Chemistry studies to perform well in this college level Chemistry class.  The problem was he had not had a Chemistry class since fourth grade.  He had only two weeks to study before he had to take the test.  To complicate things a little more, he used that same time period to study the material need to test out of the computer literacy class all incoming students are required to take.  It was a little bit of a grind, but he passed both tests without too much trouble.

We did something by accident that turned out to be important later on.  Christian and Kelly took most of their hard STEM classes together at the Community College.  They helped one another and worked together a lot.  What we did not think about when we split the kids up for this summer semester is that we really did not know how they would do in one of these hard STEM classes if they did not have each other.  It turned out OK, but if we had to do it over, we might have split them up for at least a few classes earlier in the process.

The Chemistry class was a joy to Christian.  He feels that if he had had more time to focus on that earlier, he might have even tried to get a degree in Chemistry.  He had to work hard, but got an A.  That he got an A was a confidence builder for his next semester.

Why not skip high school? (Part 8) Kelly takes a mathematical proofs class at Big State U.

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On Wednesday, April 3, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

Day 590 of 1000

This is the eighth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Learning how to do mathematical proofs for the first time is not for the faint of heart.  We decided it would be good to ease the kids through the transition form Community College to Big State U. (NCSU in this case) with a single class in the summer before entering full time in the fall of 2012.  The class Kelly chose was one called Foundations of Advanced Math.  The prerequisite for the class was Calculus II.  Here is the course description from the catalog:

Introduction to mathematical proof with focus on properties of the real number system. Elementary symbolic logic, mathematical induction, algebra of sets, relations, functions, countability. Algebraic and completeness properties of the reals.

What is not mentioned in this description is that the move from applied math to proofs requires a paradigm shift.  I wrote a little about this class as Kelly went through it here and here.  Kelly had a tremendous professor for this class.  He was a 75 year old emeritus professor who truly wanted his students to learn how to think properly about mathematics.  Here is a quotation from one of the linked posts above about the admonition this professor gave to his class.

At the beginning of the class he said it was possible to pass the class just by memorizing the proofs, but if you did it that way you would lose out on two levels.  First, it would be hard to get a good grade doing it that way.  Second, if the student did not have a “lights going on” experience during the semester, their math world would only involve ciphering and not “real” math.

He was exactly right about this.  It was doubly important for Kelly to have her “lights going on” moment because she would have two key classes called Mathematical Statistics I and II that require the ability to do and understand proofs.  It was not OK to just learn the mechanics of this class.  In her previous applied mathematics classes, Calculus I, II, III, and Linear Algebra, Kelly had Christian with whom she could collaborate when she did not understand.  Foundations of Advanced Math was the first class like this she had to take without a safety net.

She started out slowly. She studied hard, but got herself into a little bit of a hole.  She could do the material, but did not really understand it.  She studied harder and harder as the semester went along, but at the mid-point of the semester, she could do the proofs, but was not really “getting” them.  She studied even harder, late into the night every night and some time, about three quarters of the way through the class, the light went on.  She remembers a precise point when she realized she knew how to do the proofs.  It was extremely exhilarating for her.  She aced the final and got an A in the class.

Earlier, we mentioned that a light load for the first semester at community college served our children well.  Kelly’s single hard class during the summer semester before she started full time at Big State U. was very valuable both in terms of building confidence and giving her a sense for the difficulty of hard STEM classes.

The REAL name of North Carolina State U.

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On Tuesday, April 2, 2013

In General

The North Carolina State University (where Kelly and Christian go to school) is very cool.  Notice the “at Raleigh” ending of their current official name.  It is almost never used, but very cool that it is there.  Here is the progression of names:

  • North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (1887)
  • North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering (1918)
  • North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering of the University of North Carolina (1931)
  • North Carolina State of the University of North Carolina at Raleigh (1963)
  • North Carolina State University at Raleigh (1965)

A very cool quote from the article in Wikipedia having to do with the fact that NCSU is a Land Grant school is the following:

…Chapel Hill’s “elitist” education did not meet the mandate set forth by the Morrill Land-Grant Act

Alive and well in Arizona. Again.

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On Tuesday, April 2, 2013

In General

Day 589 of 1000

I am out in Prescott again with lots of stuff about which I want to write, but no time to do any writing.  Our friend, Margaret, left a comment that pointed me to a great article on inventing one’s own job and teaching people the skills they need to invent their own jobs.  I have put on my list of topics, because it is a worthy article both for a read and for commentary.  I guess I will just have to get to it when I get to it.  I am mostly through one series of posts on Why not skip high school? and have another set of posts about how to teach programming for kids, so it is not like I have writer’s block or anything.  I can hardly wait to get going.  I should have an hour or two later this afternoon.

Lorena arrives home from Monterrey

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On Sunday, March 31, 2013

In General

Day 587 of 1000

Lorerna is back from the beautful Monterrey, Nuevo Leo, Mexico.  We barely survived without her.  It is profoundly safer now that it was this time last year.  We will be going down there on a regular basis if it remains like this.  She got to see all of kids except two who live in Toluca, for whom I am the Favorite UncleTM.  Here is a picture of some of them, that outside two of which are scheduled to visit us in the U.S. this summer.

Sobrinitos Mexicanos

Jorge, Brunito, Valeria, Matias, Brandito, Marlito, y Dayanita

Why not skip high school? (Part 7) Worldview preparation is essential

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On Friday, March 29, 2013

In Art, Education

Day 585 of 1000

This is the seventh in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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We took the scriptural admonition to “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” very seriously.  We wrote about what we did in this regard fairly extensively.  An example of that is here, but if you search the word “worldview” on this blog, you will find a lot more.  We believe the kids would have floundered in college had we not made the effort, not only to describe why we believe what we believe, but to describe the beliefs of other prominently held worldviews and why we do not believe them.

The kids were prepared for some of the silliness that masquerades as higher learning in their English, Art Appreciation, and even their Biology classes.  You can read about some of the fun they had with their commie, drug legalization fanatic, English professor who made outrageously false statements about Christianity and Christian morality, but changed the subject through non-sequiturs whenever confronted with serious arguments.  The professor had taught at the community college a long time and from everything the kids could tell, he had taught this same introductory writing class in the same way for over a decade.  It was hard to decide whether his ignorance was an outgrowth of laziness or something more sinister.  You can read about it here, here, here, here, here, and here.  The sad part about this class is that they learned nothing about writing that they did not already know.

The Art Appreciation class was even worse in that the instructor reveled in abjectly immoral imagery.  The students were encouraged to break convention in morally objectionable ways.  It was totally unnecessary.  The really good part about this class is that the kids really did learn about different kinds of art and they were required to go to the North Carolina Museum of Art, something for which we are very grateful, because we have been back there many times since they took the class.

We viewed this worldview training the preparation that helped the most in allowing the kids to function well both socially and academically in their liberal arts classes.  The great thing, though, was that it was often not necessary to defend themselves with respect to their worldview.  They had History and New Testament classes where the professors were symapthetic to a Christian worldview.  The worldview training helped there, too.

The odd part, to us, was that very few students arrived at either NCSU or Wake Tech Community College with any kind of coherent well-taught worldview.

Figuring out how to program Android phones

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On Thursday, March 28, 2013

In Education, Homeschool, Software, Technology

Day 584 of 1000

Yesterday I wrote about a series I plan to write on how Christian learned to program during homeschool.  My buddy, Conrad wrote a comment about how he was interested in programming Android phones.  That very same day, another friend and I went to lunch to talk about a little Android programming project.  I have always used Eclipse to program Java in the past, but my friend pointed me to about a free, open source IDE for Java called Intellij IDEA Community.  I downloaded it, installed it, and had my first application up and running in an emulator in short order.  I will see how long it takes me to figure out how to get it running on my Samsung S III.  I think I am going to move over to that environment for awhile to see what I think.  My plan is to port BleAx to a cell phone and this might help me kill two birds with one stone.

Intellij IDEA Community edition

Computer programming for kids – a new series of posts

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On Wednesday, March 27, 2013

In Education, Homeschool, Software, Technology

Day 583 of 1000

It is my daughter, Kelly’s, birthday today.  She is now a 19 year old Statistics major at North Carolina State University and is taking her first two formal programming classes, Statistical programming with SAS and Java.  She has also programmed with the R statistical programming language.  She enjoys programming a great deal, but is a little frustrated with her Java class.  Kelly is not frustrated with the material; she enjoys that.  She is frustrated because I taught a lot of programming to Christian, but virtually none to Kelly.

She said, “Dad, why did you teach Christian how to program and not me?”

I said, “Because you enjoyed other stuff like art and crafts and Christian wanted to know how to program his Palm Pilot.”

She said, “You should have taught me, too.  I need to know how to program now and I am having to learn it from scratch.”

“You really have to have something you want to do with programming or it is really boring,” I replied.

“You made us do Mavis Beacon Typing 15 minutes every day for two years and we didn’t have any real use for it until years later.  It was really boaring at the time, but got A LOT out of being able to type faster and better than everyone else.  We are really glad you made us do that.”

All this was true.  I think I failed Kelly in this.  Christian learned how to program on his own, but I bought him the learning materials, made computers available to him, and vmade a program of study that was both systematic and and integrated part of his homeschool curricula.  The reason we did all this for Christian was because he had something he wanted to accomplish. I should have thought to teach them both how to program whether they wanted to or not.  The program we put together for Chrisian has given him a huge leg up both in class and with work opportunities.  Any student who plans to get a hard (STEM) degree, would benefit from such a study program.  I am just sorry I did not do this for Kelly.

I have decided that, when I finish my current series on Why not skip high school?, I will write a series on how we taught Christian to program.  I will link to that series from this post as soon as it is started.

Early math skills

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On Tuesday, March 26, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

My buddy, Jon from Chile, sent me an article from USA Today that sings from our hymnal.  The title of the article is Studies:  Math Skills can be predicted, improved early on.  It is a great article and pretty close to precisely what we believe about teaching and learning of math, IQ, and how early kids can learn stuff.  I love this quote from the article:

Factors such as IQ and attention span didn’t explain why some first-graders did better than others. Now Geary is studying if something that youngsters learn in preschool offers an advantage.

Large swaths of this blog are written about how we taught math to our kids in our homeschool.  Reading, exercising of memory skills and math made up the core of our educational efforts up through the first grade.  Everything became easier because of that focus.  It must have worked–Kelly is now a Senior in Statistics and Christian is a Junior in Applied Mathematics at NCSU.  This reminds me that I need to write an index to some of the stuff we wrote.  Thanks for the pointer to this great article, Jon!

Woo-hoo! Johns Hopkins Applied Research Lab wants Kelly for a statistical internship summer position

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On Tuesday, March 26, 2013

In General

Kelly just texted me with the news that she was offered a job at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as a Statistical Intern.  They made her a better offer than Caterpillar and she will be doing things like design of experiments, sample size calculations, data cleaning, and other stuff that is dead center in the subject area of her degree and the type of work she wants to do.  We are very excited.  Tonight we will talk about her options.  So far, she lost out on the NIEHS position, but she has two hard internship offers with a third from a financial services company still up in the air.

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