teaching machines

CS 330 Lecture 1 – Introduction

January 25, 2015 by Chris Johnson. Filed under cs330, lectures, spring 2015.

Agenda

• what ?s
• introductions
• meta
• define this
• tell me something you know about the shell

Who are you?

On a 1/4 sheet of paper, briefly answer these questions:

1. What’s your name?
2. What city do you call home?
3. Suppose work and school were canceled for a year and you were given the freedom to work full-time on some task of learning or creating. What would you do?
4. What programming languages do you know and why did you start learning them?

Define This

1. Pick an audience (e.g., 5th graders, dinosaurs, and so on).
2. Answer for your audience this question: “What is a programming language?”

TODO

• Read the syllabus.
• Read about the interplay of language and thought: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-language-shape-what and http://www.education.com/reference/article/language-development-2. On a 1/4 sheet of paper (created by two perpendicular folds of notebook or letter paper), write down 3-4 questions or observations relevant to these reading or the course. For instance, how do programming languages fit into these competing models, based on your own cognition? Do you side with Piaget or Vygotsky/Whorf? If Piaget is correct, how does that impact us as programmers and programming language designers? If Vygotsky and Whorf are correct, how does that impact us?

Haiku