Computer Science Canada

Ics4u?

Author:	MiniMac [ Wed Aug 01, 2012 1:06 pm ]
Post subject:	Ics4u?
How much of a difference is there between ICS3U and ICS4U? I did take ICS3U and ended up with a 75, I know I could have done better, but my teacher wasn't the best. In any case, we learned Java in ICS3U, and for anyone that has taken ICS4U, it would be great if you could share your experience with this course compared to ICS3U! Thanks in advance.

Author:	Raknarg [ Wed Aug 01, 2012 1:23 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
It really depends on your teacher, and your class. For instance, my class I had a legit computer science teacher, and everyone in my class was pretty advanced for an ICS4U class. Anyways, for me I loved it. Even though I knew more than almost everyone in my class, I still learned things that were really useful, and it was fun. Of course we did eventually go into Visual Basic, which I really don't like... but hey, it's practical. So yeah, I had fun and I learned new things. but like I said before, it depends a lot on your teacher. And if you have a good teacher, and you feel you're getting ahead of the class, get him to teach you new things like I did with my teacher

Author:	mirhagk [ Wed Aug 01, 2012 3:44 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
You really can't depend on a teacher for computer sciences, and if you find you are, and you're learning everything from the lessons, then you need to rethink it. My school is lucky to have a self-paced program where our work is all from booklets, with all the information needed to learn the material in there as well. Essentially the teacher is just there to give lessons for those who are too lazy to read, and reiterate things for people who don't understand, which frees them up to actually help people.

Author:	crossley7 [ Wed Aug 01, 2012 4:54 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
I don't think my experience of ICS 4U is relevant for anyone. My teacher didn't really teach us much and we were free to learn whatever language we want to do the programs we wanted. For instance I used C++, my friends used python and the people following course material used Java. We were also free to code whatever we felt rather than specific little dumb assignments that teach you basically nothing.

Author:	Raknarg [ Wed Aug 01, 2012 9:24 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
@mirhagk Sorry, I forgot that the point of having teachers was for them to make money, not to teach students. My teacher is very knowledgable, and I have no problem having him being my primary source for learning computer science. And @crossley7 if thats your experience, it doesnt mean teachers are useless, it means you had a bad teacher

Author:	crossley7 [ Wed Aug 01, 2012 10:14 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
I understand what it means. M teacher was useless within the classroom, yet at the same time he was actually the best teacher I have ever had. I never said he was useless. The curriculum is relatively useless (in my school board at least) and my teacher freed me from it. The best opportunities I have ever received are because of this teacher and I have him to thank for getting me into comp sci in the first place.

Author:	Raknarg [ Wed Aug 01, 2012 10:35 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
That's true, actually. But like in anything else, a good mentor is almost irreplaceable. Or at least in my opinion. You learn much faster than you could on your own, especially if they know what they're doing

Author:	Aange10 [ Wed Aug 01, 2012 11:28 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/

Author:	mirhagk [ Thu Aug 02, 2012 8:05 am ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
My compsci teacher was probably the best teacher I've had my entire life. Unfortunately our school combines ICS4U/ICS3U so that it can offer it both semesters, and there are 30 kids in the classroom. With 30 kids, and 2 grades, it's impossible to expect a lot of alone time, but he did a good job of making sure that those who needed it got it, and the rest got at least a little guidance. But the course is well designed such that we don't need someone to hold our hands the entire way. My entire school is about giving students responsibility, which ultimately results in students who can handle university and the real life (the first year university drop out/switch programs rate is MUCH lower from my school than it is for most)

Author:	Raknarg [ Thu Aug 02, 2012 11:01 am ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
frig, everyone seems to have had sub-par stuff for all their classes :/ yeah I can see that

Author:	Aange10 [ Thu Aug 02, 2012 7:09 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
I've never had any classes =/ (Minus Udacity)

Author:	Raknarg [ Thu Aug 02, 2012 8:15 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
Never took it in high school, or are you not there yet?

Author:	Aange10 [ Thu Aug 02, 2012 10:19 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
I'm a junior, it's not offered in my area. I came to compsci because I administered a server on minecraft; Then I broke off and made my own server with a fellow who programmed in pascal. I confided my desire to code, and he introduced me to turing and then Compsci. I haven't heard a lot from him because he's full time at a University. Everything I know is from finding it myself or from udacity. Disclaimer* Finding it myself doesn't mean I literally get every link and every bit of information myself. Rather, it's that I intelligently weigh my resources and then go about finding information; Sometimes it leads to google, sometimes my friends list, and sometimes Compsci. Just depends.

Author:	Raknarg [ Thu Aug 02, 2012 11:00 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
See, I had never had any interest in programming cause I had never been exposed, so I just didnt care. I was pulled in when we had an assembly at the end of my grade 9 year where we had some teachers explaining some grade 10 courses being offered. When they brought up computer science, the teacher was just talking about how they were going to make games and stuff. I assumed we would be using some software to make games or something. Turns out it was programming. I hated it at first, because it just didnt make sense. A couple weeks later, things just suddenly clicked, and I understood programming for what it was. It's an art, something I'm well familiar with. I consider myself an artist, and I rationalized the fact that art is no more than a process where you are given any tools you can find to create a desired product in any way you can. I also like to think of it as a creative logic puzzle, which follows the same rules as art. Those together, and I fell in love with it almost immediately. I don't program as often as I like, but I get really lazy. Anyways... that was kindof off topic. Point is, my school and my teachers pointed me towards the right direction and helped me a lot. I try to learn from anyone and anything I can.

Author:	Insectoid [ Fri Aug 03, 2012 9:03 am ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
I took compsci in 10th grade just to see what it was about. Now, I was never bad at school; I got decent grades in every class without trying. I was sorta good at everything, but exceptional at nothing. In compsci I was top of the class. I don't think I was especially good at it, just that everyone else was spectacularly bad. But it was so much fun I'd work on it in my spare time and shoot ahead of the class. I'd often finish assignments before my teacher finished explaining what the assignment was. In 11th grade my teacher was lazy and gave us all accounts for the online course instead of actually teaching us. I finished the whole thing in a month. 12th grade I didn't even do what my teacher told me. The class was taught in Java, which I quickly learned to hate. So I learned Ruby and did all my assignments in that. My teacher didn't care.

Author:	mirhagk [ Fri Aug 03, 2012 10:54 am ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
Compsci teachers need to be especially open to things like learning alternate languages etc. Lessons should be taught about concepts, and ways to approach problems, with the language being used being taught as the sytnax. A student should feel free to learn different syntax on their own, and program the same code in that. (I know one student that explored into compiling from one langauge, and decompiling in another just because the teacher didn't let students use alternate languages. It didn't really work lol, but you can see the downfall here). As for how I got started, it was in grade 7, someone gave me this amazing program, RPG Maker. I loved games so it was fun making them, and I quickly got into the event system, and the sort of scripting language they had. While it didn't really teach me coding, it taught me a lot of the concepts (if statements, loops, variables), which helped me quickly master turing in grade 10. Then after the 2 week intro to C++ (which everyone hated) I decided to pick up a book on it, and learn it on my own. Then after complaining about how much more difficult it was to accomplish anything in C++, and how I wanted to make some games, someone told me about XNA, and that I could make Xbox games. That was also the year our compsci course got a better teacher, who wanted to switch the course from C++ to C# for 11 and 12, so I did the later parts of grade 11, and all of grade 12 in C#, and I was happy.

Author:	Raknarg [ Fri Aug 03, 2012 12:05 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
haha man I wish we had a C++ course in our school, that would've made things so much easier I try learning on my own, but it feels just like such a momentous task, it's hard to get into.

Author:

mirhagk [ Fri Aug 03, 2012 12:31 pm ]

Post subject:

RE:Ics4u?

No trust me it was NOT easy. They used some libraries for GUI that were invented before the standard library. They actually type defined their own booleans, which of course weren't compatible, and caused the system to crash. We spent half the time trying to figure out why the library wasn't working, and the other half replacing semi-colons. The course probably taught less than the grade 11 one just because everything took so long to do. Now there's so much more packed in there because you don't have to worry about C++ crazyness.

Oh and the school provided only VC++6 or whatever it was, so any rational programmer switched to visual studio express 2005/8 (forget which it was back then). The worst part was that they didn't agree on whether

code:

for(int i=0;i<10;i++)
{
}
for(int i=0;i<5;i++)
{
}

was valid or not. Since using i as the for loop is pretty much standard, nearly all the code passed between students broke.

Author:	Raknarg [ Fri Aug 03, 2012 1:33 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
oh wow. Yay for simple Turing o suppose

Author:	Amarylis [ Sat Aug 04, 2012 1:16 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
Meh, I would've rather enjoyed tackling the madness of C++ or the more sane C# as opposed to sitting in class every day going "why are we learning only graphics stuff in Turing -_-"

Author:	mirhagk [ Sat Aug 04, 2012 2:34 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
Oh I loved learning C#, it was consistent and made sense, while still being a complete language, and we actually studied sorting methods and other algorithms

Author:	Raknarg [ Sat Aug 04, 2012 3:16 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
See, the only reason I like turing is that it's thus far been able to do whatever I want, while also being stupidly easy. It just seems like going to another language is just mostly a syntax issue.

Author:

jr5000pwp [ Sat Aug 04, 2012 4:17 pm ]

Post subject:

Re: Ics4u?

That's what I like about C#, it may not be the stupidly easy that turing is, but it is easy enough that anyone who wants to learn it, can learn it, and fairly quickly at that. There is also no tricks in C#, you're not going to go learn OOP and have it throw something like:

code:

var myClassInstance: pointer to myClass
new myClass, myClassInstance

Instead, you'll have something legible like:

code:

DoubleVector position = new DoubleVector(72.1238432, 256);

I haven't started ICS3U/ICS4U yet, but I am incredibly excited because it will be in C# and I'll find a way to make each project exciting and challenging.

Author:	mirhagk [ Sat Aug 04, 2012 5:27 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
I personally think they should teach C# in more schools because there is SOOO much to learn about the language. It has so many different ways of doing things, encompassing nearly every programming paradigm.

Author:	Raknarg [ Sat Aug 04, 2012 6:16 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
I would bother learning it if they had it available in the system. I'm lazy like that.

Author:	mirhagk [ Mon Aug 06, 2012 10:32 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
good luck with computer science then lol.

Author:	Raknarg [ Tue Aug 07, 2012 1:48 am ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
I don't see the issue, I don't need to learn another language yet. The thing that I hate that people talk about is how bad you are at programming if you can only program in turing. Language isn't important in the realm of computer science. If you want to go anywhere with it then obviously you do, but a simple language can do everything that's necessary to learn how to program, learn algorithms and concepts and everything. Why would I bother learning french if I'm going to live in texas? Sure maybe french will come in handy later on, but I will have lots of time to learn when university comes around.

Author:	Insectoid [ Tue Aug 07, 2012 6:49 am ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
Quote: I will have lots of time to learn when university comes around. Oh, how I wish that were true.

Author:	mirhagk [ Tue Aug 07, 2012 8:22 am ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
Yeah as time goes on you get less and less time. In university you'll probably need to get a job during your time off, and you'll be focused on just trying to understand course material. Learning a 2nd language in computer science is probably the most important thing to learn. Even if you never use it again, knowing a language helps you program better in the languages you do use. I have a 1 page list font 12 of all the languages I've studied, so if someone gives me a language I've studied something similar to it, and so that I know most of the major programming paradigms, and can write the best code I can in the only language I actively use (C#). Even learning french when you live in texas may be beneficial. Read [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity"]Linguistic Relativity[/url] for more information, but basically many linguistics, as well as many others (myself included) believe that the language you use affects (or controls) your thoughts, and ultimately your actions. If you use a language to think, then your limited to thinking only thoughts that are expressible in that language. You can also only communicate and receive information based on the language, so certain ideas can't be expressed. (take the english word love, which tries to, and fails to, encompass several different meanings, which other languages (greek being one) have several different words for). Try to learn as many programming languages as you can as early as you can, it aids in learning anything computer science related. Maybe even think about learning a 2nd language to be able to think better (I personally vote for lojban, which is a very programmer friendly spoken/written language, and promotes logical thinking)

Author:	Insectoid [ Tue Aug 07, 2012 9:32 am ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
If anything, learning a 2nd language will teach you how to learn even more languages quickly. And you will be learning more languages. Got a project that requires PHP? Learn PHP in two weeks and you'll be your boss's best friend. You won't learn PHP (or any language, really) in 2 weeks without having mastered five or six other languages first though.

Author:	mirhagk [ Tue Aug 07, 2012 9:48 am ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
I can attest to that actual fact. I did contracting for a while, and I recieved a contract to make something in PHP (fairly complex) and I didn't know PHP. But because I knew enough about so many languages, PHP was a breeze to learn, and it only took me a couple extra hours to do the contract. The user actually had no clue that I didn't know PHP at the start, and it didn't show in the work, because learning a new language is super easy once you know a few. I will make a thread about suggested languages that all programmers should be at least familiar with.

Author:	MiniMac [ Fri Aug 24, 2012 11:33 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
Wow, thank you everyone for your insightful responses!

Author:	MiniMac [ Thu Aug 30, 2012 2:44 pm ]
Post subject:	RE:Ics4u?
I had one more question, has anyone ever taken ICS4U online? The class at my school had gotten cancelled, so I was forced to take it online :/ Is it relatively easy to learn online? Im still kind of skeptical at the thought of learning CS online. Any replies would greatly help! Thanks.

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