On Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:23:50 +0000, kj wrote: > In <5f0a2722-45eb-468c-b6b2-b7bb80ae5...@q11g2000yqi.googlegroups.com> > Simon Forman <sajmik...@gmail.com> writes: > >>Frankly, I'm of the impression that it's a mistake not to start teaching >>programming with /the bit/ and work your way up from there. I'm not >>kidding. I wrote a (draft) article about this: "Computer Curriculum" >>http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgwr777r_31g4572gp4 > >>I really think the only good way to teach computers and programming is >>to start with a bit, and build up from there. "Ontology recapitulates >>phylogeny" > > > I happen to be very receptive to this point of view. [...] > There is this persistent idea "out there" that > programming is a very accessible skill, like cooking or gardening, > anyone can do it, and even profit from it, monetarily or otherwise, > etc., and to some extent I am actively contributing to this perception > by teaching this course to non-programmers (experimental biologists to > be more precise), but maybe this idea is not entirely true...
There is some evidence that 30-60% of people simply cannot learn to program, no matter how you teach them: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000635.html http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/ I'm sympathetic to the idea, but not entirely convinced. Perhaps the problem isn't with the students, but with the teachers, and the languages: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/PDF/SevenDeadlySins.pdf (My money is that it's a little of both.) > Maybe, to > get past the most amateurish level, one has to, one way or another, come > face-to-face with bits, compilers, algorithms, and all the rest that > real computer scientists learn about in their formal training... The "No True Scotsman" fallacy. There's nothing amateurish about building software applications that work, with well-designed interfaces and a minimum of bugs, even if you've never heard of Turing Machines. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
