i think as long as students consider the creation of software as a "have to" and not as a "want to" the respective teaching efforts will by and large fail.
secondly, i think current university education leads in may cases to a situation where true understanding is sacrificed by a superficial "handling" of the information relevant for passing exams. students approach their studies in a utilitaristic and opportunistic way and teachers are more concerned with presenting what students need to learn than with asking what student want to learn. i guess that student projects that require capability in the subject and capability in creating software might be one tactic to show students that real capability makes sense. best regards, gerold -----Ursprungliche Nachricht----- Von: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Auftrag von Simon Gray Gesendet: Sonntag, 29. Oktober 2006 14:59 An: Mark Guzdial; Jens Bennedsen; Derek M Jones Cc: Michael E. Caspersen; discuss@ppig.org Betreff: RE: SV: PPIG discuss: long term effect of introductoryprogramming education Our experience is quite similar to Mark's and I would like to hear of models for introductory programming that successfully bring in students from the sciences. The science students at Wooster program quite a bit, but few take any of our CS programming courses. The science departments don't have room in their curricula to require any additional courses and the complaints about our intro programming courses echo those Mark gives below. Most of the science programs here solve this problem through a combination of offering a very intensive programming course that focuses solely on problems within their discipline and...hacking together a solution from bits and pieces of other programs. In our (CS's) opinion, this combination is not serving the science students well, but we have been unable to convince our colleagues of this. Their students are able to put together serviceable (but not maintainable) programs for smallish problems, but are completely lost when it comes to anything larger. A physics junior approached us with a program she had written for a project and was going to extend for work she was to do for her senior thesis. She claimed that the program demonstrated that she knew everything we teach in our intro programming sequence and was asking that we waive those courses for her (don't remember why she needed that now). When we sat down with her to have her explain the code she had "written", 1) she informed us that, in fact, large chunks of it had been written by someone else as part of another project and that adapting code in that way was quite common in their department (which we confirmed, especially for the messy GUI parts), 2) she couldn't describe the code's structure, nor could she say how the code would be extended to solve what she anticipated doing for her senior thesis, and 3) she couldn't explain basic components such as arrays and functions (apparently functions are just named things to make the compiler happy); she understood selection and iteration, and could declare variables, but was fuzzy on _where_ it was best to declare them and on parameter passing in general. It was very discouraging for us. In answer to Jens' original question, I think few of our students who take our introductory course but don't go on in CS, find uses for it in their other course work or use it later, but I have no evidence for this. It is an interesting question to ask and we have wondered how we could make that first course more widely relevant without sacrificing what we feel the CS students will need as the progress through our program. - Simon Simon Gray, PhD Department of Mathematics and Computer Science College of Wooster ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
