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by TranquilMarmot 3798 days ago
I took AP Computer Science my senior year in high school (would have been... 2010? So 6 years ago) and we didn't touch computers until about halfway through the class. Before then, it was all theory and logic and big O and the like mostly in pseudocode. Then, we jumped into writing Java to match the theory we had learned. It worked wonderfully, and I found my first year in college was pretty much just re-learning what I learned that year in high school but much, much, much, much (much) slower because they were teaching Java WITH the theory instead of separate to it (which had a side effect of students being locked-in to Java in later years and not able to reason about theory in other languages)

Also, the AP test that we had to take after all was said and done was required to be done in pencil. So it was good to be used to writing pseudocode and actual code in pencil.

In college, I wouldn't have even considered typing my notes during class. I'd say about half the students in my classes used pencils, the other half typed (but were always actually checking facebook, looking at reddit, etc.). After a while, I stopped taking notes altogether when I figured out they really don't help me in any way and I never go back to them (anything I could forget is a google search and a stack overflow answer away).