Q&A: Will the Math Academy programming courses be based on the classes you taught in the original school program?
Yes, our upcoming programming courses on the system are going to completely cover all of the content that I taught in our original school program, AND much more.
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A question I’m getting more and more is “will the Math Academy programming courses be based on the classes you taught in the original school program?”
For context, I ran those classes from 2020-23 and scaffolded high schoolers up from having little to no coding experience to doing masters/PhD-level coursework (reproducing academic research papers in artificial intelligence, building everything from scratch in Python). I wrote a textbook Introduction to Algorithms and Machine Learning to support those classes.
It’s only been a couple years since then, but of the 16 students in that group, one is now at MIT, another at Caltech, another taking grad courses starting 2nd year of college (on track for early master’s degree), another did a research internship at Caltech and published a solo-author astronomy research paper in high school (and was admitted to Stanford this year)… we don’t even systematically track this info or send out alumni surveys or anything so there’s probably even more interesting stuff going on that we haven’t heard about yet.
Anyway, are our programming courses going to cover all the stuff we taught to these students?
THE ANSWER: Yes, our upcoming programming courses on the system are going to completely cover all of the content that I taught in our original school program, AND much more. They’re going to be even more comprehensive than what I taught, and way more scaffolded (i.e., way more accessible to learners in general).
Intro Programming 1 will cover all the building blocks up until classes, then Intro Programming 2 will cover object-oriented programming, then and we’ll also have Data Structures and Algorithms, Introduction to Computer Science, Machine Learning 1, and Machine Learning 2.
Each of those courses will cover everything that our school courses did, plus everything else that’s needed to give a comprehensive treatment of the subject.
Follow-Up Questions
How do you cross the bridge in programming education between “here’s how a loop/conditional/other-basics works and true programming logic thinking mastery”? No current method hammers the later.
I agree it’s infuriating how programming education resources often introduce the basic building blocks (conditionals, loops, helper functions, etc.) and never go beyond the simplest cases.
What we’re going to do is have TONS of lessons/exercises in combining the basic building blocks in progressively more complicated patterns to solve progressively more complicated problems.
Mapping out this part of the curriculum is a bit challenging because it seems like nobody else does it (at least not anywhere near the extent that we’re envisioning). But that’s what we’re going to do.
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