This page is created to record notes, thoughts, and other reflections on the educational experience of the Learn_CS group of David Weekly's Computer Science Primer [to be re-named]. 

This course (unbeknownst to David, perhaps) models some "cutting edge" ideas in education, such as:

• empowering participants to contribute to shape content and instruction: directly modifying the syllabus through the wiki, adding field trip ideas, setting group section times, and more
• putting together a serious course with high-level content outside of an educational institution that not only matches university courses but also outmatches them by providing more current material and involving "real world" practicioners, both members of the class and guests
• draws highly motivated people willing to contribute a significant amount of time to the course simplly for the pure sake of acquiring knowledge

This page is intented for participants to capture anecdotes of what this process is like, for the sake of others who may wish to model or study this type of "educational experiment" later on.

4.18.08 - Hiren

After reading all the material for the first week of class, I don't feel like I have a good grasp of what the history of the computer is like. I read it and yet it is still one dimensional. I have questions on the why and how of what certain people did before and until that is answered, I feel I won't grasp it well.

I also just randomly spent 3 hours with James and figured out a bunch of things dealing with creating websites, reading html, edited it, and touching on CSS. it was great learning by experimenting and making mistakes but we do need an expert to come in once in a while to help us break through a barrier we may be having.

4.19.08 Hiren

I am working on a project where I am trying to figure out how to improve the end users experience by experimenting with wording, positioning of rewards, when they come into play and what features make the application we are making more fun. I have been complaining recently that we really need more stats! which means we need to query our databases and generate some reports that can tell me something. So today, i took a step forward and started learning SQL on the fly. I was searching the internet for help, asking my friend who knew more than me and got a book from the library on the subject and I am starting to get some simple results back from learning. I still have to figure out a lot more functions and how generate reports, but I think I am finally taking some steps to learn something new even though I'll mess up 90% of the time.

4.21.08 Hiren

So I'm stuck with the advance functions I need to learn to really generate some useful data off the databases. The manual isn't helping me much and there is something high level in these new functions that are out of my reach. I need to find an expert or something who knows better and pick their brains. Argh...  Forums? Ping my acqs? hmm..