John Zelle wrote: >I think it's obvious to everyone that a course that tackles "real world" >problems will be more interesting than one that doesn't. But that doesn't >mean simple scripts can't address real world issues. > But there is a basic, probably irreversible - anti-synergistic - evolution that seems to have occurred that has exasperated the problem. The peeling off of programming introduction to CS, and the peeling off of CS from everything else.
Seems to me that in order to tackle real world problems we should be working within a specific problem domain - as a starting point. Within a particular domain, it is more realistic to build in stages, to the point of getting to something useful - within that domain. For many of us, "introduction to programming" is too broad a context in which to be introduced to programming. In the math/programming synergy at an earlier stage (not too early, please) strategy, the introduction course in the CS department evolves into something more than what it apparently needs to be now. We know a little, and presumably know we have an interest in knowing more than that. Kirby, it seems to me, is right about all this. It's just less brilliant to be right about this than Kirby sometimes seems to make it sound. It really is nothing more than accepting the obvious, give up on beating the game, and just play it. The push back on this strategy here had always been yuck, Math. We are turning on back on the artist, the literature types, the hardcore gamer, the web. Yuck on that position, IMO. "What is" isn't infinitely malleable. We are only saying what most obviously is. Where a foundation of and for computing understanding most appropriately grounds itself. The "yuck math" is a position I came to identify with CPUE, early on . Perhaps wrongly, or prematurely, but the association is there. And why I found it necessary to bury that banner, for myself - more than any other reason. Kirby seems to have done better. End of polemics. Art _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
