Chapman Kids Blog

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

Category: Education Page 15 of 18

How to teach computer programming to kids (Part 2) Working with Linux – Compiling and Linking

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On Sunday, April 14, 2013

In Education, Homeschool, Software, Technology

Day 601 of 1000

This is the second 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 think it was about 2005 when Christian was ten years old or so that he really took an interest in how software works on a computer.  I am not talking about how to use software on a computer.  I am talking about how it actually works.  We had an old Dell Desktop (I forget the model) with Ubuntu Linux installed on it.  All Christian wanted to do at first was install some games and some drawing and rendering programs.  The way you did that with Ubuntu is through the use of a GUI front-end program called Synaptic that managed program installation, updating, deleting, etc. using a program tool called APT (Advanced Packaging Tool).

He got pretty good at that, but the computer was so limited in its capabilities and resources he would often get stuck.  This led him to the use of Google to find answers to his questions about how to get unstuck. The problem was that he often stayed stuck because there were no good answers on the internet, even after a thorough search.  The next step, then, was to ask experts on forums like Ubuntu Fourms.  The answers often came in the form of a command line (non-GUI) process where he had to open up a console to get a command prompt so he could follow the procedures he was given.  Little by little, he got proficient at using the Linux command line to run APT and other utilities, getting help from man pages, and learning Linux’s basic directory structure.

Next, he started to run into programs that were not set up for installation via APT, so he learned how to install programs from the source code.  The way it works is that a program’s source code, usually C/C++ is downloaded from the internet.  It is set up for the computer on which it will be installed and customize for the needs of the user by running a program called configure.  Then a program called make is run to compile and link the program which creates the binaries (the actual file(s) that will run the program).  Finally, make is run again, but with the word install after it so that the program will be moved to the correct folder in the Linux file system so that the user will know where and how to start the program and the program will know the location of other files it needs to run properly.

The set of steps listed in the previous paragraph–configure, make, make install–is the normal procedure used to take programs written in C/C++ as text files, turn them into programs that will run on a computer, put the files in the correct folder on the disk drive, and assure all additional files required to run the program are in the right place.  Sometimes the names of these steps change depending on the computer, operating system, and other factors, but the process is essentially the same.  The problem is that the configure, make, make install process hides compiliation and linking from the user.  That is a good thing most of the time, but a person who wants to learn how to program needs to know how to compile and link a program, not just follow the cookbook configure, make, make install process.

Fortunately for Christian, the configure, make, make install process, for some fairly technical reasons, did not allow him to control the installation of the programs he wanted to run in the way he wanted to run them.  Specifically because of that, he started to read and learn about the compiling and linking process.  For some programs, there are heavily documented, step-by-step procedures to walk through that process.  This helped him understand how a program called a compiler takes a text file that holds a C/C++ program and converts it into a binary file and how a second program called a linker takes that binary file and links it to other program files that it needs to run properly.

It is not possible to program without knowledge about how to perform compiling and linking.  This can be hidden from the programmer in something called an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which we will talk about later, but it is best to get started just the way Christian got started, learning the command line usage of the compiler and linker because this gives a much better understanding of the process needed to test and run a hand-written computer program.

All of the above happened under my radar.  At first he did this to get games and drawing programs running, but eventually, he just wanted to learn more about how Linux and the programming process worked.  All I really did in this process was provide a ten year old boy an old, piece of trash computer that had no programs on it that interested him.  He did the rest.  I am not sure how I would have taught this to him in a structured way, but I will take a stab at explaining how that could be done toward the end of this series of posts.

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

Why not skip high school? (Part 6) That supposedly thorny socialization question

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On Monday, March 25, 2013

In Education, Homeschool, Socialization

Day 581 of 1000

This is the sixth 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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This post is not about socialization in a homeschool.  The move from homeschool to college after the eighth grade at age fourteen is a somewhat more thorny issue.  I have explained why we believe the socialization that occurs in typical homeschool settings is profoundly better than what currently happens in traditional government and private school settings here.  There are links to reasearch and additional articles on socialization in that post.  This post describes some of the things we considered with respect to socialization when we chose to move our kids from homeschool directly into college.

Timing

The timing has somewhat to do with the fact that we were not aware that Kelly could have handled college work at least a couple of years before she went to college.  After she passed her third or fourth CLEP exam and got good scores on the ACT college placement exam it became apparent that she could probably handle the academic rigor of college.  Still, we do not think we would have put her in college then even if we would have been aware that she could handle it.  The reason is that she was very young and she would have been attending college on her own.  We think it was good that she waited that extra couple of years during which she took many more CLEP tests for college credit and worked on the understanding the intellectual underpinnigs of our worldview1.

When the time came to consider college for Kelly when she was sixteen, we still thought she might be a little unsure of herself to handle the social aspects of college on her own.  We did not want her to be too far from home and we did not want her to be alone.  By that time, we had been through some pretty rigorous worldview education with both the kids.  Kelly and Christian have always been very supportive of each other, so we thought that, if they went to the Community College together, they would, at least, give each other some moral support and it might not be so scary.  We now knew through testing and for other reasons that Christian could hand college, go we decided to pull the trigger and put them in college together.

The Social Environment at Community College

We were surprised by the high professional and academic standards of the teachers at Wake Tech, but even more surprised and appreciative for the kindness and helpfulness of both the teachers and the administrative staff.  Of course there were a few who did not want to do their job or had (being gracious here) bad people skills, but they were definitely the exception and not the rule.  Our expectations about the students was quite a pleasant surprise.  There was a very interesting mix of students at Wake Tech.  There was a good mix of foreign students, vocational and college prep students right out of high school, people in the work force trying to upgrade their skills or get a degree, and maybe a little bit unique to Wake Tech, soldiers recently discharged from military service at Ft. Bragg, going to school on the G.I. bill.

Kelly and Christian befriended a pretty amazing mix of people.  They made four special friends with whom they remained in contact.  Nestor and Daniela are a brother and sister from Venezuela who come from a close-knit Latin family.  They took the same hard math and science classes as Kelly and Christian.  What was really great about them is that they also had a Latin mother and understood Kelly and Christian in ways that are sometimes difficult for gringos.  Christian still gets to have a class with Nestor and Daniela every now and then at NCSU.

Mike is an Iraq War veteran who pretty much adopted the kids.  They took almost all of their math classes together.  It is hard to over emphasize what a great thing it was to have Mike as their friend.  Make was old enough, mature enough, and sure enough of himself to not care to much what anyone thought about him, including the commie English professor he took one semester before Kelly and Christian got him.  He was unfailingly kind to the kids, more conservative (but not by much) than me, and willing to give the kids advice and correction when they needed it.  They still love the guy and are grateful that Mike went on to NCSU with them.

Finally, there is Mr. McCarter.  He was the kids math professor for Calculus II, Calculus III, and Linear Algebra.  He talked and joked with the kids and Mike every day before and after class.  They send Mr. McCarter an email every now and then to let him know how they are doing.  They owe a lot to him for the encouragement he gave them and the rigor with which he taught his math classes.

The upshot is that Community College was very scary when the kids first started.  They got to turn down invitiations to parties that were illegal on their own right, but would have been profoundly illegal if two underage kids would have showed up there.  The saw lots of drugs, heard all kinds of immoral jokes and stories, and heard all manner of casually used bad language.  They even saw a fist fight our two.  They came away from Community College with their Christian worldview intact and with a good mix of wonderful friends.

The Social Environment at Big State University

The social transition to NCSU was interesting.  It seemed to be a big advantage to not have been socialized in the artificial world that only exist in traditional government and private schools where self-esteem and political correctness are preached as if they were holy writ.  The entire educational experience of most of the kids entering the university was in a highly regulated, institutionalized environment where decisions were made for them about what they studied, when they could talk with a time and place for virtually everything chosen by the school district or state set regulation.  The self-esteem thing was particularly apparent when the kids went to new student orientation.  Since the kids were both in their Junior years in hard degrees, so they did not have to spend much time with the freshmen.  By the time students make it to their Junior year in a hard (STEM) degree, some of the narcissism gets knocked out of them.

Conclusion

All in all, the kids homeschool transition served them very well in their move from Junior high school to college.

1.  See this link on worldview considerations.

Why not skip high school? (Part 1) Introduction

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On Saturday, March 16, 2013

In Education, Homeschool, Socialization

Day 572 of 1000

This is the first 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.

[Next post in series]

People send in questions and I try to answer them here:  Answers to homeschool questions

I thought I would write a few posts on why we think skipping high school is a great idea.  I will write about the positive reasons for skipping high school, how we did it, and the actually outcomes for our children.  The bad of what passes for a traditional high school education these days seems to out weigh the good by a lot.  Still, I do not plan to write much about the abject failure of the majority of traditional high schools in America–at least not in this series of posts.

We definitely made some mistakes on the way, but it has been fabulously gratifying.  Sometimes we went too slow. Sometimes we tried to go too fast.  We serendipitously lucked into activities and opportunities that moved us forward.  We missed deadlines and made mistakes through laziness, incompetence, and ignorance that set us back.  Most of all, though, we made a plan and then just plugged away at it for about a decade.  The plugging got tedious at times, but we can honestly say it was worth it.  Joy, gratification, and humility are the words all of us, kids and adults alike, would use to talk about the educational path we chose for our family.

I have written an outline for what I want to write and will keep a list of links on this page.

Why NCSU is a great school to study Statistics

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On Wednesday, March 13, 2013

In Business, Education

Day 569 of 1000

It is tough to get a job these days.  I feel sorry for kids in University who need a summer internship or a job when they graduate.  Christian plans to go to grad school and has already had an internship so it does not affect him so much.  Kelly, on the other hand, wants an internship this summer, so she went to two job fairs at NCSU to get leads.  She got six interviews.  She has received two job offers so far, but turned down one of them because it was not a good match.  She is one of two finalists for a third position and has not heard from a fourth.  In this market, that is a pretty amazing record.  I think the reason she received so many offers when others did not is because she studies Statistics.  It seems like there are a lot more jobs available to engineers, but there are also a lot more people chasing those jobs.  For each job that requires a statistician, there are way fewer people with the skills to do the work. 

The other thing is that NCSU uniquely trains their Statistics majors in the use of commonly used industry tools.  For example, Kelly has a class that teaches her how to perform statistical programming.  The programming environment they use is SAS which is expensive enough that individual students cannot afford to it.  The reason it is available to NCSU is that SAS started at NCSU and still has a close affiliation with the school.  At they end of the class, she should have learned everything necessary to get her first SAS certification.  The class even offers them the opportunity to take the certification test at a discount rate.  The students use SAS and R, normal industry tools, to do their homework in other classes, too.  The expectation is that the students will be able to walk into a new job and contribute the first day.

An ancillary benefit to the SAS training is the ability to talk about the use of these tools effectively in an interview.  I think this was huge in her last interview with one of the research labs at Johns Hopkins.  Kelly could explain in detail how she would accomplish specific tasks such as data cleaning and analysis.

Is a double degree in math and engineering worth an extra year of college?

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On Sunday, February 3, 2013

In Education

The math department switched Christian’s adviser on him last week.  He met with his new adviser late Friday afternoon.  Christian worked hard to make a plan to finish his degree by spring of 2014 that would prepare him to go on to a PhD program in Electrical Engineering.  His previous adviser thought it was a fine plan.  Our friend Igor (PhD mathematical physicist and all-around really smart guy from Russia) thought it was a fine plan.  I thought it was a fine plan.

A professor in charge of graduate research in the Electrical Engineering department at Stanford thought enough of the plan that he said, “I would be delighted to meet you to show you Stanford and talk about research opportunities…”

A professor who runs a research program in Control Theory in the Electrical Engineering department at Cal Tech said, “It looks like you’re doing the right things academically.”

The new adviser was very interested and engaged during the advising session, but developed a plan that would take entire fifth year of college to complete.  I think part of the problem is that Christian’s previous adviser told him to add Electrical Engineering as a second major because, if he did not, the University would not allow him to take many of the Electrical Engineering classes he needs.  He explained that to the new adviser, but she pushed on anyway because I think she really believes that is his best path to getting what he wants.

The kids and I have spoken about this often.  There might be some circumstances where it makes sense to take another year to get a second Bachelors degree having to do with a desire to get into a graduate school that requires a specific bachelors degree for entry into a program.  Still, there are a LOT of good schools in this world and it most often makes more sense to pick a different school that allows a student to take leveling classes before or after they are admitted to a Masters degree program.  The result is way better.

I worked with a girl started with a Bachelors degree in English then took two years of classes (part time) at a good regional university that lead to her acceptance into a Masters degree in Mechanical engineering.  She did it by getting good grades and getting to know the people who had the power to accept her into the program.  I got a weak (because I did not work hard, not because the program was bad) Bachelors degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing when I got out of high school.  I took quite a bit of math and science before I switched to business, then got an associate degree in electronics, something that flies completely in the face of the advise I am giving here, but I thought that is what I needed to do to get a job.

Ten years after I left school, Bachelor and Associate degrees in hand, and after I worked my way into an application engineering position, I got recruited by a professor at University of Texas at El Paso to set up a machine vision lab.  When I got there, he asked me why I did not get a Masters degree in Industrial Engineering while I was at it.  I explained that I only had an associate degree and a Bachelors degree in Business.  He said that would not be a problem, I could take some leveling classes to pick up the stuff I did not have and demonstrate I could handle the workload.  Two years later, I was accepted into a top ten Industrial Engineering PhD program at Texas A&M.  I did not finish there because of life, but they were very happy with my academic background.

The point is it most often does not make sense to get a second Bachelors degree when it will take an extra year and a lot of extra money to do it.  Christian has done a ton of due diligence with respect to what he wants to do when he finishes here at NCSU.  He has talked to advisers at school, highly qualified people he met in his internship work over two summers, and even me.  He has started contacting people in charge of graduate programs where he wants to go.  He developed a study plan very early and has continually reviewed and revised it based on input from others and research about the schools and areas of study he wishes to pursue.

We spent about two hours last night to write a concise email to his new adviser to explain all this.  We had some heated discussions about what should be in the email.  Christian did all the writing. He wrote a first pass, then made lots and lots of revisions.  In the end, the email was much shorter than the first draft.  He made his case to the adviser.  In his meeting with her, Christian could tell she was a very good adviser who tries to get things right for her charges.  She has already given him some good advise about changes he could make that he plans to implement.  This kind of iterative approach works very well in these kinds of situations and we have great hope Christian can put together a plan that will get him what he needs while it avoids wasting time and resources.

CLEP testing and community college

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On Thursday, January 31, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

Day 528 of 1000

I got a nice plug today from a relatively new blog name Joe, Stefani, Faith, and Hope that got me to thinking about some of the stuff we did in our homeschool.  We really do not think we did everything exactly right, but there are several things for which we are very grateful.  Two of them in particular turned out great.  First, the CLEP tests were great and I think we got them just about right.  Both the kids started taking them at about age 13 and kept them up until they went off to community college.  The community college thing is the other thing that was both effective and a super experience for our kids, but I have mixed feelings on the timing.

In terms of the CLEP tests, Kelly took a lot more of them than Christian, and that helped her when she went to both NCSU and Wake Tech, but Christian is a year and a half younger than Kelly.  They started community college at the same time, so Christian did not have time to take as many tests as Kelly.  In my previous discussions, I explain that we did not only take the CLEP tests for credit, but as supplemental subject matter and college preparation material for our regular homeschool classes.  This really worked like a champ.  We were able to prepare the kids for some of the silliness that is taught in many college humanities classes (as well, sadly, as some of the biological and environmental sciences).  The kids were more prepared for college level material than they might have been had they taken the regular homeschool classes without the supplemental CLEP materials.

I cannot say enough good about the kids community college experience.  Our only mixed feelings were that Kelly waited until she was 16 years old to start there while Christian started when he was 14.  We are pretty sure Kelly could have handled it just fine, but it was hugely beneficial that they started school together.  Many homeschoolers start in dual enrollment programs that are offered to local high schools.  I think that is fine, but we are very happy we did not do that.  Rather, both the kids started as full time students.  Both of them took a light load of 12-13 hours the first semester, just enough to be full time.  The CLEP tests they took gave them enough credit that, even after a light first semester, they were ahead of schedule.

The problem with many of the dual enrollment programs is that often they offer a very limited number of classes and there are onerous restrictions on students under the age of 16 years of age.  As a 14 year old, dual enrolled student, Christian would have had to have Lorena with him at all times.  As a fully enrolled student, he did not have that restriction and he could enroll in any class the school offered.  It is very interesting that students who graduate from Wake Tech do better at NCSU, grade-wise, than students who start there as freshman.

We are particularly pleased with the quality and acceptance of their education.  Christian and Kelly both plan to go on to graduate school when they finish their bachelors degree.  Having attended the community college first did not diminish their opportunities for graduate school, work, and internship opportunities.  I will talk more about where they plan to go next.  All in all, homeschool, CLEP testing, and community college have provided a sound educational foundation for which we are very grateful.

Working on Java with Kelly

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On Wednesday, January 16, 2013

In Education, Software

Day 513 of 1000

Both Kelly and Christian have a class in the Java programming language this semester.  Christian has done a significant amount of programming already, so for him, the class it is more of a nuisance class than anything else.  Kelly has really only programmed in the R and SAS statistical programming languages.  She has never learned a general purpose programming language like Java or C++.  Shame on me.  She struggled with her first assignment and the teacher had made some draconian admonishments about not getting any help, so she did not want me to she her what to do.  That would have been OK if the teacher would have explained the stuff in any way that makes any sense.

So, I helped her with her first assignment.  I did none of the typing, but we walked through the programming assignment step by step, then went through another in-depth explanation of exactly what went on in the program as it ran.  I LOVED it.  Kelly has a knack for programming and picks stuff up fast, so it was fun.  The other thing that is an issue is that she has to write and run the programs over an SSH link from a Linux computer.  That stinks.  It would not be so bad if we had the computer set up right, but we do not and I will not be able to help much until I return from Arizona.  Right now, the way I help her is by cutting and pasting the code snippets into a gmail chat session and talking through it over the phone.

We have a different plan going forward.  I am going to show Kelly how to do several things.

  1. Install Skype in Linux so we can share desktops and talk while Kelly is programming.
  2. Install the Oracle JDK (Java Development Kit) so Kelly can develop and run Java programs on her computer before she SSH’s in to do it on the NCSU computer.
  3. Install Eclipse so Kelly will have an IDE for Java program development.

As for myself, I installed the above stuff in Windows last night at the Prescott Valley Public Library so I could run programs as I helped Kelly.  Now, I have to think about how I am going to do the new Android GaugeCam application, in Java or C/C++.  I will probably stick with C/C++ because I will be able to reuse a bunch of libraries, but Eclipse looks like a great development environment for developing for Android.

Kelly celebrates her Dean’s Circle Scholarship at NCSU

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On Thursday, October 4, 2012

In Education

Kelly's Scholarship Dinner ProgramKelly went to the annual scholarship dinner for the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. She was one of only four in her college to win a Dean’s Circle Scholarship. That is a merit only scholarship specifically for competitive recruiting. It was quite an honor and she had a great time.  She talked with donors and other honoree’s at a dinner that featured “lots of forks.”  We thought she looked quite fetching so we took her picture!

Kelly goes to the scholarship dinner

Kelly goes to the scholarship dinner #2

Instant messaging with the kids

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On Monday, September 17, 2012

In Education, Homeschool

Day 393 of 1000

I always thought I was a pretty fast typist.  Whenever I instant message with people, I spend most of my time waiting for people to respond.  I was messaging with my sister this morning–she is about the same speed as me, so we can have a great conversation, but then Kelly got on and started messaging with me at the same time.  Christian and Kelly are WAY fast.  I started laughing when I saw her messages start popping up because it is just amazing.  The reason they can type so fast is that when they were both about six or seven years old we did not want them wasting their time playing video games.  We let them play a few later one (mainly Nancy Drew mysteries), but at that age I wanted them playing outside.  Still, I felt kind of bad, so I got a copy of Mavis Beacon Typing.  They each got to spend 15 minutes per day on that during the summer.  They both did that for about five summers and the result is that they are now screaming fast instant messagers.  The law of unintended consequences.

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