[curun1r]

I don't know about general purpose computers, but my life would be completely different if my high school hadn't required the use of computers that masqueraded as calculators.

My school required us to use either a TI-81 or TI-85 and my friends and I quickly discovered the power of TI-Basic. We started with small games to amuse ourselves, since this was an era before mobile phones. But I quickly realized that I could write programs to solve the kinds of problems I expected to see on my math tests. And I was amazed when I asked my teachers whether I was allowed to do that and they said yes...it felt like cheating. Suddenly studying became an altogether different experience where cramming and hoping I'd learned enough was replaced by writing small scripts that gave me full confidence I'd ace the tests. It was so much more efficient. The funny part was, I never actually used my programs during the tests...the act of programming, I realized, forced me to understand the material in a way that cramming never did.

From that experience, and a Doom-like game I built on my calculator, that spurred me to take a computer programming class the summer before college and eventually major in CS and go into tech. And none of that would have happened if my math teachers hadn't been so open minded about allowing us to use what was essentially a computer in class and on tests. So I hope they're not advocating removing all computers from class, because I'd be sad if the path I took into tech was closed to today's students.

[dragonshed]

I had a very similar experience. I didn't get a computer until I showed my parents something I'd built on a TI-81. The one difficulty I had was a physics teacher who would go around and factory reset the calculator prior to tests, and that was just fine by me until I started making large games and things I wanted to keep. I ended up making a reset emulator to fake the teacher and allow me to keep my apps.

[jimhefferon]

Education has fads so a person learns to be cautious about things in this field. But one that seems to have a lot to it is helping students be more active learners. Working through those programs sounds like it helped you in that way.

I teach Theory of Computation and one problem with that course (which I expect lots of people here have taken) is that it can be people watching as things get proved. I'm working on a text that includes programming work;there have been others in this direction but my point is that I hear more stuff like your comment where people are taken through the material in doing the scripts.