Computer Education

"George & Oksana Wiegand" wrote: I think this is one of the most interesting questions I've seen here in a while. I've been nipping at a nice Barolo, so I'll save real commentary till later. I'm a bit enamored with "course 6" at MIT. But I'm not in love with the mix of students. Way too skewed toward high test scores with out enough arts and common sense. Few of them lust after dancing puti sculpled by dead italian guys. But they do have a mean microprocessor lab course (6-114/6-115). I'll bet that is on the web. Recently I've run into Olin College here in Boston. I think it might have potential. I don't know enough about the curriculum to say but the students I've talked to are top notch and not afraid at all to do fundumental engineering work. I was pretty impressed with a group who flew water rockets from their quad in the middle of the night and used doppler shift to track the different phases of propulsion & flight. not bad given all they had was a sound card and matlab. and some others made a full blown pong game hire those guys. Some day I'd like to look into Carnegie Mellon. Everyone I've met from there had good fundamentals. I don't know their program but it seems to good. But as for logical order, I'm not sure. Most try to not be 'vo-tech schools' but then get lost trying to cover fundamentals. I have strong opinions but they are probably just that, opinions. I (hah) naturally believe in massaging the shoulders of the giants we all stand on, so I'd start by reproducing the Eniac in a FPGA :-) And then doing an in-depth study of Grace Hopper, followed by Gordon Bell and some of those upstart guys from Leyland Stanford. I might make a few semiconductors from scratch along the way and write a paper or two on how storage scopes really work. Oh, and a paper or two on why those holes flow the way they do. I'm still trying to figure out why those holes move they way they do. And I'd also study the Manhattan project and Enrico Fermi. But that's me. I remember I ran into a brief report on Lous Slotin when I was in high school. Ever since then I'm really careful when I pry something open with a screwdriver. -brad