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Randy Pausch, teaching parallel programming concepts, and engaging kids for CS future

By Mary Alessini (Intel) (1 posts) on April 7, 2008 at 2:41 pm

I was at SIGCSE with Michael Wrinn and others from Intel. In the first keynote there, I was introduced to Randy and his work by Dennis Cosgrove and Wanda Dann. Randy was unable to be there and do the keynote because he was in Washington, testifying to the US Congress about funding for pancreatic cancer research. If you do not know Randy and his work, you must watch The Last Lecture. You do not want to be the only one who hasn't. Here in the US, Diane Sawyer/ABC are doing a TV program this Wednesday, April 9th at 10pm eastern. Ok, then, as I was saying, Dennis and Wanda were covering for Randy, and I got to talk to Wanda later in the day about her work on the Alice Project at Carnegie Mellon and more. We all hear a lot these days about the dropping enrollment rates in the US (is this happening globally?) for computer sciences and math programs. And with the SIGCSE focus on diversity, we touched on what was happening to girls specifically. Why are they disengaging from this or not even interested in the first place? Wanda has seen that it is not apparent to the student how this future course of study will lead to their contribution to society. They chose alternate areas of study where the connection is more clear. So, that is one challenge, how can we address it? Another challenge: we are asking CS faculty to add courseware/lessons on material (parallel programming) that had been taught only at advanced stages in the curricula or as electives – how are they supposed to do it? See Sam Midkiff's discussion on this; what do you think it will take?And finally (for today), the industry is going to keep evolving the technology, as witnessed in Michael's SIGCSE presentation "Confronting Manycore," how can we help faculty better? Should we start working with K-12? Is there more that we can be doing with the undergrad faculty?

I look forward to the discussion.

Categories: Academic, Parallel Programming

Comments (6)

April 7, 2008 3:56 PM PDT Bill Pearson (Intel) Total Points: 820 Status Points: 320 Brown Belt

Welcome to the community Mary. I agree that we need more math and computer science graduates in the US. I've seen data that suggests China and India are doing quite well though. I just read an article in the local paper about a student who wanted to become a full-time aid worker. She said that she would probably have to break down at some point and get a job to support herself. It would probably do a lot of good if we did a better job of showing the impact that science and technology has had on society. On the other hand, it almost seems obvious doesn't it?

April 7, 2008 4:01 PM PDT Aaron Tersteeg (Intel) Total Points: 15,721 Status Points: 15,721 Community Manager

Welcome to the Blog-o-sphere. Glad to hear that you had some great take aways from the SIGCSE conference. As someone in computer science it is very clear to me the impact that CS has on society. Did Wanda present a conclusion on what needs to be done to make the connection for girls. Did her study show that boy were not interested in making a contribution to society? WOW!

April 7, 2008 4:34 PM PDT Max Hailperin

Definitely Intel should stay engaged with K-12, as should we all -- but we have to be careful about what that means. For example, it doesn't mean pushing bleeding edge material on many-core processing down into K-12. My own top priority for K-12 would be more mainstreaming of CS topics into other courses, primarily math. As I briefly argued in the New York Times (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE4DA103DF.....A96E958260) almost a decade ago -- and as I think is even more true today -- by reserving computer science for elective courses (whether at the high school or college level), we are essentially demanding that students make the decision whether to elect those courses without any real information about their content. So what basis will the decisions be made on? Only such highly gendered (and otherwise biased) grounds as whether the student's self-image matches with their image of a computer scientist.

April 7, 2008 6:59 PM PDT paul steinberg

Sent from my blackberry, so excuse the mess. Your refernce to gender preferences/decisions really hit home with me as the father of two daughters. In my experience, any grade school engagement with computer functionality, as in being able to create, is not only regaded as geeky, to be expected, but as unredeembly male. Basic creative tasks, whether they be digital and graphic imaging web coding and scripting, should be taught early and preferably incofporated into existing art, math and science curiculum.

April 25, 2008 4:41 PM PDT Robert Chesebrough (Intel) Total Points: 980 Status Points: 480 Brown Belt

Mary Great blog! I'm finally getting around to downloading Alice at home for kids to study/play with. In looking thru sample chapter of manual - looks like I'll have to splurge for another programming book :-) to get the full manual - I see they support a "do together" contruct - see chapter two http://www.aliceprogramming.net/text/chapt2_Design.pdf This is really great! This is the right approach in my estimation. Teach kids a fun way to program - by telling stories. This is a classic "head fake" by the Carnegie team. kids think there just having fun - but they are learning object oriented programming and also - some parallelism at the same time! My wife & I ordered a CD about Randy's story - his "last Lecture" and it is really motivational!! In that video he describes a "head fake" - meaning faking one direction to get your attention with a bigger aim and movement elsewhere. I'm thinking we need to amplify the message about Alice programming classes to other Universities for their freshman college programming classes! Also there is a version of Alice - more suitable foryounger kids Cheers Bob C

April 27, 2008 6:54 AM PDT Ravi Manohar

It is interesting to note that Carroll (to whom the name 'Alice' pays homage) has embedded this 'head fake' in his writings - without calling it so! Or, as Randy Pausch says of Carroll, 'he could do intellectually difficult things but also realized the most powerful thing was to be able to communicate clearly and in an entertaining way'. Here is an example - a piece of startling logic from Through the Looking Glass: ------------ 'I don't REJOICE in insects at all,' Alice explained, 'because I'm rather afraid of them--at least the large kinds. But I can tell you the names of some of them.' 'Of course they answer to their names?' the Gnat remarked carelessly. 'I never knew them do it.' 'What's the use of their having names,' the Gnat said, 'if they won't answer to them?' 'No use to THEM,' said Alice; 'but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?' ------------ I used this passage as an introduction to an article I wrote on arrays for a programming class - to explain why elements in an array need 'names' - a means for others to uniquely identify them. So, first things first: maybe we should be thinking of including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in the K-12 Recommended Reading Lists?! - Ravi

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