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Beth Simon Pull Quotes
Beth Simon holds a bizarrely titled position in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. As a Lecturer with the Potential for Security of Employment she is interested in the study of how people learn computer science. Beth's computer science education research focuses on Tablet PCs in education, student's preconceptions of computing topics, and debugging.
This webpage gives excerpts taken from the interview of Beth Simon conducted on the 26th of June 2007 in Dundee, Scotland by Barbara Boucher Owens The entire interview and transcript are also available from here.
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Beth Simon
University of California, San Diege and
The University of British Columbia 13 mb mp3 interview opens in new window 7 mb avi video snippet opens in new window pdf interview transcript opens in new window |
"In my small town, we actually had a computer science course in my high school. I did not want to take it because I did not like the teacher ... All the boys took it and they played video games and messed around with stuff. But my dad wanted me to try computing. He bought a Turbo Pascal book. I said I won't take a class and do it... I did an independent study. I sat in the typing lab which had IBMs and I put my Borland Pascal disk in and I probably worked through the first chapter or two. And what I liked about it was you would type in a program and it may or may not work. You didn't have to wait ... The error messages were actually kind of meaningful back in Pascal... [E]ventually you could win. You would get it right and the computer would do what you wanted it to do." Link to this audio snippet in new window |
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