On Sep 14, 2004, at 1:30 AM, Jan Erik Mostr�m wrote:
My experience (I work as a teacher at a university) and some papers (which I
don't currently remember, but probably something from ESP, PPIG or some
similar venue) is that transfer works very poorly. Beginning programmers
doesn't see the similarity between, for example, an if-statement i C and one
in Pascal. Each programming language is a new skill/concept to learn.
True. It's important, however, to preserve the distinction made in the literature between "access" of prior knowledge (noticing that there's a similarity between C and Pascal) and the final mapping and "application" of prior knowledge: programmers DO find it easier to pick up Pascal after learning C, once they figure the syntax out and realize that it's all the same thing.
It's possible that programming skills could transfer to the real world too, but it's hard to say how, and possibly harder to claim that it's more cost-effective to teach programming as a general skill than, say, algebra, physics or calculus.
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