Shayan From Uni

How to teach computer thingies

Intro

Through out the years I've been learning about computers, I always have wondered what is the best method or way to teach computer thingies, I mean things like the command line and its power, a text editor like emacs or vim or even zed or vs code and the ides people use, or how to learn these things by yourself. How to find new thing to learn about. All these things plus programming itself, in a sense that the whole process and not only writing code. As I have mentiod above, the editor is a key component to a programmer's life so knowing how to use one efficiently can be really helpful. A programmer needs more than editor, she needs an os and the whole thing about Linux and stuff. How the os works, or how you can customize it to suit your needs best way possible.

The Reason

My reason to write this is not to point out the things you should learn as a programmer or CE major in general instead I am writing this to expole what are new ways to approach this relatively new topic.

My experience

From my experience and many others the first initial steps in this journey are probably the hardest. You might know absolutely nothing about this stuff so where would start then. I think just watching someone who knows a thing or two can be helpful. Although you might argue that this not the way learning works or this people are not going understand and think about topics deeply. I somewhat agree with that but the thing is that the person in charge is just taking her first steps. Your expectations should be aligned with her skills and knowledge.

The exec plan

There are some talented people which I know at our department. Way more skilled and knowledgeable than me. And I believe there are many who I am unaware of, so with that in mind we can have Tsoding style videos homebrewed. We can let people like me do the easier, more entry level stuff and they do more technical things. I was thinking maybe streams with multiple people, I mean with an ongoing conversation or maybe switching so that they can see multiple different setups and get different inspirations. Probably in English because why not. It kind of reminds me of a course in mit with the title "The things you haven't been taught in CS but you should have" or something similar which they teach bash, vim and some other cli tools like maybe git. It is nice to teach these things in uni though, I am not fan the way they are taught which lead us to first part.