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by DonHopkins 2079 days ago
Jens Mönig and Brian Harvey both received a National Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS) Educational Technology Leadership Award for their impact on educational technology over the course of a lifetime, for their work on Snap!

https://ntls.info/ntls-educational-leadership-award/brian-ha...

>[...] Snap! is a remarkable technological achievement. However, like Logo, its greatest achievement is arguably the educational philosophy that it draws upon and supports, and the associated community drawn together by this philosophy. In a very real sense, the Snap! community embodies the spirit of the early Logo community, extending it for the modern world. The NTLS Educational Technology Leadership Award, awarded to Brian Harvey and Jens Möenig, is presented in recognition of that accomplishment.

2 comments

It’s awesome to see Brian Harvey get recognition. He’s an incredible educator - the finest I’ve encountered - and I’ll be forever grateful that I got to experience that at Berkeley before he retired.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Harvey_(lecturer)

Wow, thanks! My own opinion is far less extreme. :~) But I definitely appreciate hearing yours.
Learning Scheme and SiCP from him in CS61A was my best experience in college. Pity it happened first semester freshmen year ;-)
Kind of unfortunate CS61A is now Python.
I have mixed feelings. Learning Lisp was extremely eye-opening, and I was amazed at how much could be done with such a simple language. It inspired me to learn way more about theoretical CS, knowledge which continues to serve me to this day, even though I wound up in a different field. I definitely came away a believer in Greenspun's tenth rule.

OTOH, for most 61a students, this course (indeed the entire major) amounts to a very expensive form of vocational training. Developing an aesthetic appreciation for finely crafted code seems somewhat orthogonal to their end goal, which in 99% of cases is getting a high-paying job writing Python, C++, or some other A-list language. I can't really see the benefit of a formative semester spent on honing their Lisp chops. As educators, we want to believe that the latter leads to the former, but I'm a bit skeptical.

Very well deserved, Jens is an awesome person.
I can second that. The code of Snap! itself is virtually all Jens. My main contribution was teaching him about lambda.
You're awesome too Brian! Didn't mean to be exclusive, I know just know Jens better from SIGCSE.