Thursday, January 18, 2018
6:30 PM to 9:00 PM
Unbounce
4th floor, 401 W Georgia St, Vancouver, V6B 5A1, BC
We'll be waiting for you in the lobby from 6:15
The fantastic Godfrey Chan is gifting us with a talk about Rethinking Computer Science Education on January 18th!
?? Rethinking Computer Science Education
> Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.
Teaching is really giving out a gift in the form of a skill. The best thing a teacher could teach is the meta-skill of self-learning, a gift that feeds a person's intellect for a lifetime.
All of these are pretty uncontroversial. Every educator thinks that this is what they are ultimately trying to accomplish. However, our 21st century economy makes things pretty difficult. As it turns out, most of us are not farmers or fishermen anymore. In today's economy, what is the fish? What does it actually mean to teach someone to fish?
In tech, the line is even more blurry. If we teach someone to, say, build Rails applications today, is that teaching them a skill, or is that just giving them a fish that would perish in a few years? What about teaching programming? Many cities have announced plans to bring programming into their regular school curriculum. Is that teaching students to fish? In our industry, what does it really mean to “learn to fish”?
?? Godfrey is a member of the Ruby on Rails and Ember.js core teams. He was born and raised in Hong Kong, and later moved to Vancouver, Canada where he studied Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. Upon graduation, he worked at and co-founded a few startups (caliper.io, brewhouse.io, goodbits.io) and became an active open-source contributor along the way. He is currently based in Portland, Oregon, splitting his time between open-source consulting and building Skylight at Tilde Inc.