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Raleigh, NC
Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting. She's a maker at heart who is often behind a sewing machine creating costumes, rolling fondant for an excessively large cake, or looking for the next great DIY project.
Authored Comments
Michael--I agree, this is an amazingly cool project. And thanks for the note--I edited the article to include the links there as well.
<p>Remedial may be the wrong word, but I think the idea is right. I endured a similar torture--I mean class--my first year in business school. It was to teach freshmen how to use MS Office. Two other students and I made an agreement with the professor not to have to show up anymore after demonstrating that we didn't need to be there in the first place.</p><p>But like that, many majors offer introductory courses. Why not comp sci? Maybe the right model is the one that schools often use in foreign language departments--a testing/placement system. It's illogical for someone who's studied French since middle school to start in college with "je suis, tu es, il est." So we accomodate that with testing and appropriate level placement. In the same way, a longtime hacker could skip Intro to Text Editors and go straight to learning new things.</p>