Richard Buckland's UNSW Computing 1 - learn with games, puzzles and friends

Richard Buckland's UNSW Computing 1 - learn with games, puzzles and friends(openlearning.com)

13 points by abrimo 13 years ago | 6 comments

Nice, Richard is the best lecturer in CSE. I miss my COMP1 days

OrangeCoconut 13 years ago | |

Agreed, I'm sure this course will be as great as his lectures were/are. Stoked to see his name randomly pop up on HN.

This is really exciting. OpenLearning looks like it's really going to give the other learning websites a run for their money too.

mran 13 years ago |

can't wait to take the course!

ddd1600 13 years ago |

Programming in C! How encouraging for the beginner! Why not ruby?

Look, astrophysics has a word for spots on the sun. Sunspots. Meanwhile the most fundamental molecule of life is deoxyribonucleic acid. That last word is a product of the classic education system which encouraged "gentlemen" (today: "engineers") to study Latin and Greek.

Now I'm not discouraging the teaching and book-printing of rudimentary languages like C and Latin, but maybe C (and Latin) aren't meant to be learned today by beginners in a conversational manner. Students who are curious will naturally look back to ancestor-languages (I have books on C and Perl now as a ruby programmer). For Latin and Greek we have sites like etymonline.com, which are great.

What is it with you guys? Are you worried that once the newbies go ruby they'll never go back? Back where? We all need to evolve as developers. Haha soapbox I apologize. I like C syntax.

codedvillain 13 years ago | |

I think much of this course is also about "under the hood" - what's going on at a memory level, and fun things to do with microprocessors to get an understanding of the whole shebang. I think if you can be taught to get good grasp of the execution stack, heap memory and pointers, then teaching yourself ruby, python, or any other more abstract language would be a breeze.