Wednesday, September 12, 2012

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?







Thomas Ho said...

I hope to get MY school district to take up this idea:

Algot Runeman said...

Curriculum matters, too.

Jumping directly (in pre college courses) into compiled languages places barriers that are unnecessary. Two of the sometimes acknowledged benefits of BASIC were that it was built into computers in the 1970s and that it was accessible by being interpreted.

Languages like today's Python come close to the mark. The majority of programming structure can be implemented while avoiding the complexity of the compilation tool chain.

Python also has the huge benefit of being widely available. It also can be installed at the school and the student's home without license restrictions. Making it easy to do creative work at home is a significant benefit.

Another element helps, too: Teaching a broad curriculum. A pre-university curriculum needs to avoid making programming just an extension of the math curriculum. There's nothing wrong with math, but coding logic mainly depends on relatively basic math. Making students think that programming is math limits its attractiveness.

It still may happen that students who are engaged by programming during high school will balk at the early CS courses in college, but the pool of applicants will probably be larger than it currently is.

Leigh Ann said...

Computer Science courses also have different expectations when it comes to the everyday work of the course. Instead of attempting a problem, submitting the solution you worked on and receiving feedback (at which point you move on regardless of the correctness), instead you are asked to struggle with problems until they are correct.

Its very frustrating for students who are used to attempting something, getting a grade, and moving on. We need more coursework earlier on in schools that emphasize problem solving as an iterative process and not just a "first attempt" one.

Shadrack said...

I think the situation where students sign up and later drop out is a common problem in many faculties, not just Computer Science. I saw it happen in the final year of my Bachelor of Arts degree when I took Archaeology at first-year level because I needed a single credit to complete my degree. In the beginning, the lecture room was so full that all the seats were taken and there were students sitting in the aisles but by the end of the first quarter, a third of the students had dropped out. By the mid-year break, another third had gone. We’d all heard that Archaeology was an ‘easy credit’ (which it wasn’t) but unlike those of us who were genuinely interested in studying archaeology, acing an easy course was their sole reason for signing up. Had the university offered a week-long introductory course for prospective students of Archaeology, this would never have happened. Then again, the archaeology department would not have benefited from the injection of cash resulting from the tuition fees of these misguided drop outs.

Shadrack, webmaster for