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On the contrary. She's a f***ing idiot. She never missed dis'ing math and anybody who does it. Since I lived those decades, I didn't encounter this. Sure, there were...
Maybe it depends on what you mean by "how to deal with computers". I agree that it's unlikely that any student today would get to college without having some exposure to computers. Apparently, though, some of them don't manage to acquire the skills likely to be needed in any white-collar job these days (use of "office suite" applications, etc.), and at least one school offers a course intended to remedy that:
Huh? Did I not make myself clear here, or are you making some not-entirely-related point .... Trying to clarify:
As far as I know, the ratio of males to females in this clbutt is closer to the ratio of males to females in the whole undergraduate population, rather than being significantly different as it is with courses for the major. Women might even be "overrepresented", if on average they score worse on the placement exam.
IMO none of this is particularly relevant to ratios of males to females in "real" CS courses (i.e., the ones that can count for the major).
Right. Which as far as I can tell has nothing to do with how many males and females take a course that's...
Excellent. And he learned from it. Apparently not all students do. Ask him .... Nah, I just checked the catalog of the school where you say he's enrolled. Apparently they don't have a course like the one I described above, but their list of "general requirements" for a degree mentions ability to use "computer technology". You could ask him how they screen for that, if they do -- as best I can tell, it seems to be addressed in the first-year writing course.
Yeah .... How to provide the experience you apparently had -- a course that non-majors might sign up for, and then get interested -- is a topic of discussion among faculty. (I doubt we're unique in this regard.) One way is to make the CS1 course ("introduction to programming") fill one of the university's general-breadth requirements; then students can be told "give it a try -- if you like it, you can pursue the subject, and if you don't, you've still filled one of those 'one from column A, one from column B' requirements you have to meet to graduate." Something else that has been proposed -- and apparently tried elsewhere -- is to offer an alternate CS1-type course that gets across the basic ideas but appeals to people who are put off by whatever they think "intro to programming" is.
-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
Alt Folklore Computers from Newsgroups