On Fri, 27 May 2016, Paul Koning wrote:
["Demystification"]
Those first two titles sound reasonable. The third sounds strangely
touchy-feely rather than like an engineering course.
A touchy-feely nickname applied by those who personally wouldn't have
anything to do with it.
They had a brilliant visionary concept of CS education.
I would not put it that way. "Brilliant" is a term of praise, as is
"visionary".
"insane"? "out of touch with reality"?
sarcasm is always risky here.
They tried to change the entire paradigm of beginning CS education into
their image.
I'm surprised that such people would be working at a supposedly highly
regarded outfit like Berkeley.
an infra structure that may promote such, or may put "out of the way" in
something uncared about, such as undergraduate lower-division.
To be fair, I haven't heard anything from them in decades, so I have no
idea how successful they were, nor whether their goals have changed.
UC for awhile accepted our "Data Structures And Algorithms" class and our
"Advanced Microcomputer Programming" for transfer as a substitute for
their "Demystification" course, but then suddenly dropped them with a
stated reason of "The CATALOG description of them does not mention
interrupt handlers". (no, their catalog is also not a complete list of
course content)
Later, for a few years, they accepted my "Microcomputer Assembly Language"
and my "Computer Math" as substitutes for other reasonably irrelevant
courses.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
